Several Citizen Lab reports have highlighted the digital threats that journalists face. In the past year alone, we’ve investigated three separate cases where journalists and news outlets have been the targets of online harassment, manipulation, and persecution.
On July 10, 2017 Citizen Lab’s Reckless III report received front page coverage on the New York Times. This research revealed phishing attempts made against international investigators who were in Mexico probing the mass disappearance off 43 students.
Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert gave a talk at the Berkeley Centre for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) as part of a seminar series, in which he spoke about “Cyber Espionage and Civil Society: A Silent Epidemic.” In his presentation, Deibert focused on Citizen Lab’s work on targeted digital threats.
Director Ron Deibert was profiled in the Mozilla Foundation’s StoryEngine, which curates stories about Internet leaders and advocates, and gave an interview outlining the Citizen Lab’s work.
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.
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.
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.
