Publications

Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow John Scott-Railton has published an updated version of his “Security for the High-Risk user” paper, first published in the IEEE Security & Privacy in spring 2016. The updates were made based on new evidence of attacks against two-factor and account recovery SMSes, underlining the need for innovation in two-factor authentication.

This report describes how a government targeted an internationally recognized human rights defender, Ahmed Mansoor, with the Trident, a chain of zero-day exploits designed to infect his iPhone with sophisticated commercial spyware.

This report describes a malware operation against the Syrian Opposition. We name the operator Group5, and suspect they have not been previously-reported. Group5 used “just enough” technical sophistication, combined with social engineering, to target computers and mobile phones with malware.

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.

This report describes the latest iteration in a long-running espionage campaign against the Tibetan community. We describe how the attackers continuously adapt their campaigns to their targets, shifting tactics from document-based malware to conventional phishing