May 4 – Toronto, Canada

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

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.

This report describes an espionage operation using government-exclusive spyware to target Mexican government food scientists and two public health advocates.

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.

In an interview with Canada’s International Development Research Centre and Canadian Geographic, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert explained the work of the Cyber Stewards Network (CSN), which aims to increases cybersecurity in the global south, and conducts advocacy campaigns surrounding the protection of human rights in the digital sphere.

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.

In this report we provide the first systematic study of keyword and website censorship on WeChat, the most popular chat app in China