On June 14, 2022, Bill C-26, an Act respecting cybersecurity, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, was introduced into Parliament for the first reading by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendicino. Hearings on Bill C-26 are scheduled to begin in SECU (the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Safety and… Read more »

بين شهري مايو وسبتمبر 2023، استُهدِف عضو البرلمان المصري السابق أحمد الطنطاوي ببرنامج التجسس Predator من Cytrox عبر روابط أُرسلت إليه عبر رسائل قصيرة و رسائل WhatsApp. وقع الاستهداف بعد أن صرح الطنطاوي علنًا بخطته للترشح لمنصب الرئاسة في الانتخابات المصرية لعام 2024.

Amnesty International’s Security Lab has just published Caught in the Net as part of the European Investigative Collaborations‘ Predator Files, which details a threat actor sending what they assess to be Predator infection links on social media in replies to Twitter / X posts by officials, journalists and other members of civil society. The Citizen… Read more »

Between May and September 2023, former Egyptian MP Ahmed Eltantawy was targeted with Cytrox’s Predator spyware via links sent on SMS and WhatsApp after Eltantawy publicly stated his plans to run for President in the 2024 Egyptian elections. As Egypt is a known customer of Cytrox’s Predator spyware, and the spyware was delivered via network injection from a device located physically inside Egypt, we attribute the attack to the Egyptian government with high confidence.

In an investigative collaboration with Access Now, the Citizen Lab has analyzed forensic artifacts from the iPhone of award-winning exiled Russian investigative journalist Galina Timchenko and found with high confidence that on or around February 10th, 2023 it was infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. 

In August 2019 a wave of websites and social media channels, called “HKLEAKS,” began “doxxing” the identities and personal information of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. While the creators of these sites and channels claimed that HKLEAKS was the product of local volunteer communities, several indicators suggest a coordinated information operation conducted by professional actors in alignment with Chinese state interests.

We conducted the first analysis of WeChat’s tracking ecosystem. Using reverse engineering methods to intercept WeChat’s network requests, we identified exactly what types of data the WeChat app is sending to its servers, and when. This report is part one of a two-part series on a privacy and security analysis of the WeChat ecosystem.

This FAQ accompanies the full report on privacy in the WeChat ecosystem. We analyzes privacy issues with popular app WeChat by reviewing the data collected by the app and sent to WeChat servers during the regular operation of its various features. We find that they collect more usage data than is disclosed in the WeChat privacy policy.

We identified widespread Pegasus spyware infections within Armenian civil society. We also identified two suspected Pegasus operators in Azerbaijan, whom we call BOZBASH and YANAR.