In a recent article for Ethics & International Affairs, Citizen Lab founder and director Ronald Deibert challenges the dominant “national security–centric” approach to cybersecurity, reflecting deep divisions to how the broad topic of cybersecurity is currently approached.
As parents all over the world review back-to-school safety tips with their kids, researchers have revealed serious security vulnerabilities in South Korean children’s apps that may leave some parents asking: are our kids safer without them?
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.
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.
The second post in this series examines a Chinese mobile payment app feature increasingly covered in foreign media: testing of what may one day be a nationwide official social credit system to replace its traditional analog counterpart. Our exploration of potential security, privacy, and other issues of such a system is meant to raise questions that can inform discussions about how it will evolve.
This research series presents an in-depth examination of mobile payment systems, a rapidly evolving form of financial technology. We will provide an overview of how they are used in China–where they are taking off faster than anywhere else in the world–and what implications their security and data protection practices may have for millions of users, by presenting a case study on Alipay.
A New York Times article describing the growth of email spyware as a political weapon, titled “Cyberwar for Sale,” cited Citizen Lab research into Hacking Team, an Italian team that creates spyware for sale to governments. In particular, the article cites Citizen Lab’s work in exposing the use of Hacking Team software on the devices of Moroccan, UAE, and Ethiopian activists.
In an op-ed for CNN, security technologist Bruce Schneier explores the difficulty of attributing the cyberattack to Russia. In doing so, Schneier makes reference to Citizen Lab’s work in identifying the source of cyberattacks against activists and dissidents, including the United Arab Emirates targeting of human right’s activist Ahmed Mansour.