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.
From the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Ghomeshi talked to Soldatov about the surveillance infrastructure Russia set up in anticipation of the Olympic Games.
A new Citizen Lab report has found that Canada-based Netsweeper filtering products have been identified on three ISPs in Somalia.
This report maps out covert surveillance networks of “proxy servers” used to launder data that RCS exfiltrates from infected computers, through third countries, to an “endpoint,” which we believe represents the spyware’s government operator.
This post is the second in a series of posts that focus on the global proliferation and use of Hacking Team’s RCS spyware, which is sold exclusively to governments.
Our latest report identified three instances where Ethiopian journalist group ESAT was targeted with spyware in the space of two hours by a single attacker. In each case, the spyware appeared to be RCS (Remote Control System), which is programmed and sold exclusively to governments by Milan-based Hacking Team.
Soldatov and Borogan have been investigating the Russian surveillance state as part of a joint project by Aventura.ru, the Citizen Lab and Privacy International.
