Report
Phones belonging to four Jordanian human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists were hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between August 2019 and December 2021. We assess that at least two of the four targets were hacked by Pegasus operators primarily focused on Jordan, based on SMS messages containing Pegasus links that map to a cluster of domain names focusing on Jordanian themes.
Since our report in August 2021, we find that Apple has eliminated their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan. However, Apple continues to perform broad, keyword-based political censorship outside of mainland China in Hong Kong, despite human rights groups’ recommendations for American companies to resist blocking content.
In this report, we describe how activists and dissidents living in Canada are impacted by digital transnational repression. We conclude that digital transnational repression has a serious impact on these communities, including their ability to undertake transnational advocacy work related to human rights. Yet, there is little support for victims who experience such targeting and policy efforts by the Canadian government to date have been insufficient.
MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
The Citizen Lab and Access Now have confirmed 35 cases of journalists and members of civil society whose phones were successfully infected with NSO’s Pegasus spyware between July 2020 and November 2021. We shared a sample of forensic data with Amnesty International’s Security Lab which independently confirms the findings.
Two Egyptians—exiled politician Ayman Nour and the host of a popular news program (who wishes to remain anonymous)—were hacked with Predator spyware, built and sold by the previously little-known mercenary spyware developer Cytrox. The phone of Ayman Nour was simultaneously infected with both Cytrox’s Predator and NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, operated by two different government clients.
China’s sophisticated filtering system, known as the Great Firewall (GFW), is the region’s biggest impediment to the freedom of information. The GFW is built by the Chinese government and is continuously developed to serve their political interests. In this report, we introduce the design of GFWatch, a large-scale longitudinal measurement platform that informs the public about how GFW censorship changes over time and its negative impact on the free flow of information.
Our forensic analysis of two iPhones belonging to Hubbard found evidence of Pegasus infections in July 2020 and June 2021. Notably, these infections occurred after Hubbard reported in January 2020 that we found that he was targeted in 2018 by the Saudi Arabia-linked Pegasus operator that we call KINGDOM.
In this report, we undertake a preliminary comparative analysis of how different information technologies were mobilized in response to COVID-19 to collect data, the extent to which Canadian laws impeded the response to COVID-19, and the potential consequences of reforming data protection or privacy laws to enable more expansive data collection, use, or disclosure of personal information in future health emergencies.
While analyzing the phone of a Saudi activist infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, we discovered a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage. The exploit, which we call FORCEDENTRY, targets Apple’s image rendering library, and was effective against Apple iOS, MacOS and WatchOS devices.
