Europe
Citizen Lab senior researcher Bill Marczak served as a key witness in a UK ruling that ordered Saudi Arabia to pay £3m to a London dissident who was targeted with Pegasus spyware. In 2018, Citizen Lab researchers discovered that a Saudi operator called KINGDOM was targeting dissidents abroad with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. Saudi activist and […]
Citizen Lab senior research associate Emile Dirks will be attending a meeting on transnational repression (TNR) at the EU Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 28, during which Nate Schenkkan (lead author, independent researcher), Zselyke Csaky (senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform), Alexander Dukalskis (Assistant Professor at University College Dublin at […]
A recent story by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals that a communications firm in London paid an editor to launder Wikipedia pages for high-profile clients. Senior researcher Alberto Fittarelli speaks with the Bureau, explaining that “influence operators are attracted to Wikipedia because it is a means of shaping perceptions in large populations.” Blatant changes […]
On January 14, Citizen Lab senior researcher Marcus Michaelsen testified on transnational repression in a hearing of the Human Rights Committee in the German parliament (Bundestag). In a submission to the committee, Michaelsen highlights how transnational repression increasingly affects people in exile and diaspora communities in democratic countries like Germany, undermining their human rights and […]
Another member of Italian civil society has gone public about being a target of Paragon spyware. Francesco Nicodemo, a prominent Italian communications executive and political advisor, is the fifth confirmed target of an ongoing spyware scandal in Italy. Citizen Lab first identified the abuse of Paragon’s Graphite spyware against Italian civil society in March 2025, […]
On November 12, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton will partake in the panel titled “From Stasi to Spyware: Old Tactics, New Technology” at Berlin Freedom Week. The session will explore how authoritarian surveillance mechanisms — then and now — affect those targeted, how societies can respond, how solidarity with victims can be strengthened, and what political […]
A new U.K. age-verification law aimed to protect children can push people to seedier parts of the web. Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton spoke with the Washington Post about the “law of unintended consequences” faced by regulators. The law “suppresses traffic to compliant platforms while driving users to sites without age verification,” says Scott-Railton. “The more […]
In May 2025, Keir Giles, a well-known expert on Russian military operations, was targeted with a highly sophisticated and personalized phishing attack. Using a method not previously observed by the Citizen Lab, the attacker posed as a U.S. State Department employee to convince Mr. Giles to create and send app-specific passwords for his email accounts, bypassing multi-factor authentication. Google spotted and blocked the attack, attributing it to a Russian state-backed operator.
On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists who consented to the technical analysis of their cases. In this report, we discuss key findings from our forensic analyses of their devices.
On May 13, 2025, the Citizen Lab’s senior researcher John Scott-Railton testified before the European Union Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (‘LIBE committee’) to share findings from our recent report on the proliferation of Paragon spyware. “When we look at the pie chart of [spyware] targeting to see who was targeted […]
