Circles is a surveillance firm that reportedly exploits weaknesses in the global mobile phone system to snoop on calls, texts, and the location of phones around the globe, and is affiliated with NSO Group, which develops the oft-abused Pegasus spyware. Using Internet scanning, we found a unique signature associated with the hostnames of Check Point firewalls used in Circles deployments, enabling us to identify Circles deployments in at least 25 countries.

Citizen Lab validates Amnesty International investigation showing targeting of staff member and Saudi activist with NSO Group’s technology.

This report describes a malware operation against the Syrian Opposition. We name the operator Group5, and suspect they have not been previously-reported. Group5 used “just enough” technical sophistication, combined with social engineering, to target computers and mobile phones with malware.

This article, written by Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons and CIPPIC Staff lawyer Tamir Israel, analyzes how successive federal governments of Canada have actively sought to weaken the communications encryption available to Canadians. The article covers regulations imposed on mobile telecommunications providers, state authorities’ abilities to compel decryption keys from telecommunications providers writ large, and Canada’s signals intelligence agency’s deliberate propagation of flawed encryption protocols.

This document describes key identifiers used by mobile devices, highlights some identifiers that are accessible, and often collected, by various parties and the risks associated with the widespread transmission and use of these identifiers.

This edition of Social Media Watch deals with top court rulings on digital privacy, social media monitoring, and mobile security news.

This month’s Social Media Watch looks at the privacy concerns around Facebook’s Graph Search, an open letter to Skype detailing concerns about its practices, several noteworthy legislative privacy stories and several other policy, security and privacy stories from the social media community.

Seth Hardy was interviewed in a piece about the use of smartphones in cybercrime.