In this blog post, we report on malware campaigns targeting human rights groups using the PlugX Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

2012 Google Policy Fellow Kieran Bergmann wrote an article titled Outsourcing Censorship for the Canadian International Council on how governments in Asia are increasing their efforts to control online content.

The August 2012 issue of Southeast Asia CyberWatch covers related developments in Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

This issue of the Middle East and North Africa Cyber Watch covers topics such as censorship and filtering, blogger arrests, cyber attacks, Internet and social media use, and technology.

Director Ron Deibert wrote an article for iPolitics titled Towards stewardship in cyberspace.

The Citizen Lab has analyzed recent targeted malware attacks against Tibetan organizations that share a common payload — LURK malware — and command-and-control server, as well as several other features.

OpenNet Initiative research has documented that web filtering applied by India-based ISPs is also filtering content for customers of an ISP in Oman. This “upstream filtering” is restricting access to news sites, political blogs and file sharing sites for customer’s of Omantel, who have limited opportunities for recourse. Combined with the significant filtering implemented by Omantel itself, this essentially puts users in Oman behind multiple layers of national-level filtering.

The June 2012 issue of Southeast Asia Cyber Watch contains news articles from Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Citizen Lab analyzes a recent targeted malware attack against the Tibetan community spoofing the June 14, 2012 resolution of the European Parliament (EP) on the human rights situation in Tibet. While such repurposing of authentic content for use as a malware delivery mechanism is not unusual, this incident raises serious questions surrounding the use of legitimate political resources for illegitimate ends.