We analyze a newly discovered Android implant that we attribute to Hacking Team and highlight the political subtext of the bait content and attack context. In addition, we expose the functionality and architecture of Hacking Team’s Remote Control system and operator tradecraft in never-before published detail.
The Citizen Lab’s Cyber Stewards Network (CSN) was featured in the 2014 Asia Research News magazine, an annual publication highlighting interesting on-going research in universities and research institutions in Asia.
Citizen Lab has collaborated with Human Rights Watch to document Internet censorship in Ethiopia.
Cyber Steward Shahzad Ahmad, Director of Bytes for All (B4A), has won the Doughty Street Advocacy Award as part of Index on Censorship’s 2014 Freedom of Expression Awards. Ahmad was nominated in the advocacy category which recognizes activists fighting for free expression around the world.
Bytes for All (B4A) is continuing its battle at the Lahore High Court against Internet censorship in Pakistan. The court case has highlighted the ongoing censorship of YouTube in Pakistan, a result of the video sharing site’s refusal to block the controversial “Innocence of Muslims” video.
Our analysis traces Hacking Team’s Remote Control System’s (RCS) proxy chains, and finds that dedicated US-based servers are part of the RCS infrastructure implemented by the governments of Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ethiopia, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates in their espionage and/or law enforcement operations.
This report outlines an extensive US nexus for a network of servers forming part of the collection infrastructure of Hacking Team’s Remote Control System. The network, which includes data centers across the US, is used to obscure government clients of Hacking Team. It is used by at least 10 countries ranging from Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan to Korea, Poland and Ethiopia. In addition we highlight an intriguing US-only Hacking Team circuit.
An article on commercial spyware in Voice of America cited Citizen Lab research into ‘lawful intercept’ spyware such as FinSpy.
Citizen Lab Research Fellow Jason Q. Ng wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal about the alleged China-related censorship on the international version of Bing.com, the search engine operated by Microsoft.
Andrei Soldatov and Morgan Marquis-Boire were interviewed for a New Yorker article on the surveillance in Sochi and the state of surveillance in Russia.
