December 29 – Hamburg, Germany

Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak was featured in a Vanity Fair article exploring his discovery of the spyware used to target UAE dissident Ahmed Mansoor, detailed in a recent Citizen Lab report.

Cyber Stewards Network Partner 7iber met with Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert, as well as Senior Research Fellows John-Scott Railton and Bill Marczak to discuss the Lab’s work in exposing spy systems in various countries, and in particular, the Middle East.

Citizen Lab Cyber Stewards Network Partner Pirongrong Ramasoota was featured in a Bangkok Post article exploring the role of the Thai government’s censorship measures and the subsequent rise of hate speech online.

In this post, we critically examine the Government of Canada’s proposal to indiscriminately access subscriber identity information that is possessed by telecommunications service providers. We conclude by arguing that the government has failed to justify its case for such access to the information.

In this report, we confirm the use of the services of Canadian company Netsweeper, Inc. to censor access to the Internet in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

In this report we analyze Windows and Android versions of web browser UC Browser, and find they transmitted personally identifiable information with easily decryptable encryption and were vulnerable to arbitrary code execution during software updates

This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call Stealth Falcon. The attacks have been conducted from 2012 until the present, against Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents.

May 13 – Hong Kong