Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert was interviewed by the Globe and Mail, discussing topics like hacktivism, Canadian intelligence agencies, and the use of commercial spyware.

March 31 – Toronto, Canada

Director Ron Deibert was profiled in the Mozilla Foundation’s StoryEngine, which curates stories about Internet leaders and advocates, and gave an interview outlining the Citizen Lab’s work.

We are releasing a more comprehensive “checklist” consolidating our thoughts on how best to confront the lack of accountability in the commercial spyware trade.

On February 12, 2017 Citizen Lab’s Bitter Sweet report received front page coverage on the New York Times. This research revealed espionage attempts made against public health officials who were opponents of a controversial Mexican soda tax.

This post recaps Citizen Lab’s major research reports for 2016, which span issues surrounding censorship, surveillance, privacy, and cybersecurity as they relate to fitness trackers, political dissidents, social media users, and more.

The Division of Engineering Science and The Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs has one position available for an Engineering Science student completing Year 2 or Year 3, for a summer fellowship.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert has been named as part of the “Humans of the Year” series of VICE Motherboard, which profiles his work in defending cyber security through studies of hacking groups and censorship worldwide.

This report discusses the targeting of Egyptian NGOs by Nile Phish, a large-scale phishing campaign. Almost all of the targets we identified are also implicated in Case 173, a sprawling legal case brought by the Egyptian government against NGOs, which has been referred to as an “unprecedented crackdown” on Egypt’s civil society. Nile Phish operators demonstrate an intimate knowledge of Egyptian NGOs, and are able to roll out phishing attacks within hours of government actions, such as arrests.

The second post in this series examines a Chinese mobile payment app feature increasingly covered in foreign media: testing of what may one day be a nationwide official social credit system to replace its traditional analog counterpart. Our exploration of potential security, privacy, and other issues of such a system is meant to raise questions that can inform discussions about how it will evolve.