Citizen Lab surveillance research on Hacking Team and FinFisher highlighted in articles on Motherboard, the Varsity, and the New York Times.

Citizen Lab Cyber Stewards Network partner EngageMedia co-hosted a public forum in Bangkok on October 17, together with the Foundation for Internet and Civic Culture, discussing the pending Internet laws in Thailand.

This report provides a detailed, mixed methods analysis of Information controls related to the Yemen armed conflict, with research commencing at the end of 2014 and continuing through October 20, 2015. The research confirms that Internet filtering products sold by the Canadian company Netsweeper have been installed on and are presently in operation in the state-owned and operated ISP YemenNet, the most utilized ISP in the country.

This report analyzes a campaign of targeted attacks against an NGO working on environmental issues in Southeast Asia. Our analysis reveals connections between these attacks, recent strategic web compromises against Burmese government websites, and previous campaigns targeting groups in the Tibetan community.

This post describes the results of Internet scanning we recently conducted to identify the users of FinFisher, a sophisticated and user-friendly spyware suite sold exclusively to governments. We devise a method for querying FinFisher’s “anonymizing proxies” to unmask the true location of the spyware’s master servers. Since the master servers are installed on the premises of FinFisher customers, tracing the servers allows us to identify which governments are likely using FinFisher. In some cases, we can trace the servers to specific entities inside a government by correlating our scan results with publicly available sources.

A “secret network” launched by the Canadian federal government last year, costing millions of dollars to taxpayers, came under close scrutiny following a suspected hack. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christoper Parsons explains the possibilities behind the leaking of the document.

This article, written by Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons and CIPPIC Staff lawyer Tamir Israel, analyzes how successive federal governments of Canada have actively sought to weaken the communications encryption available to Canadians. The article covers regulations imposed on mobile telecommunications providers, state authorities’ abilities to compel decryption keys from telecommunications providers writ large, and Canada’s signals intelligence agency’s deliberate propagation of flawed encryption protocols.

The Media Democracy Fund, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, selected Cyber Stewards Network partners Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) and Derechos Digitales as recipients of the Quantified Society Grants.

The Media Democracy Fund, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, selected Cyber Stewards Network partners Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) and Derechos Digitales as recipients of the Quantified Society Grants.

Hacking Team, a Milan-based developer of “offensive security” technology that markets its products to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world, was significantly compromised when hackers leaked nearly 400 GB of its internal data, including emails, client files, and financial documents. The leak was announced via Hacking Team’s own compromised Twitter account, and the content made publicly available. Among other things, the leaked documents confirmed our findings that the company sells its software to several governments with repressive human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and more.