In an article published on openDemocracy.net, Citizen Lab Senior Legal Advisor Sarah McKune writes about the digital threats that civil society organizations (CSOs) face in carrying out their work, which undermine their privacy and compromise sensitive information. “To address this problem we must expand the terms and scope of the debate, exploring the link between the right to privacy and access to digital security more fully,” said McKune.

Summary of our report, entitled “Communities @ Risk: Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society,” in the Tibetan language.

A new report, entitled “Communities @ Risk: Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society,” involved 10 civil society groups that enrolled as study subjects over a period of four years. The study sought to obtain greater visibility into an often overlooked digital risk environment affecting–whether they know it or not–many of society’s most essential institutions.

At USENIX Security 2014 Citizen Lab researchers presented two papers on targeted threats against civil society communities as part of a dedicated session on the topic entitled Tracking Targeted Attacks against Civilians and NGOs.

In the past 24 hours The Citizen Lab has identified a maliciously repackaged copy of the popular circumvention software Psiphon 3. This post describes the malware and outlines steps to be taken.

In this report, Citizen Lab researchers Morgan Marquis-Boire and John Scott-Railton and EFF Global Policy Analyst Eva Galperin outline how pro-government attackers have targeted the Syrian opposition, as well as NGO workers and journalists, with social engineering and “Remote Access Tools” (RAT)

The Targeted Threat Index is a metric for assigning an overall threat ranking score to email messages that deliver malware to a victim’s computer. The TTI metric was first introduced at SecTor 2013 as part of the talk “RATastrophe: Monitoring a Malware Menagerie” by Katie Kleemola, Seth Hardy, and Greg Wiseman.

In this post, we report on “Surtr”, a malware family that has been used in targeted malware campaigns against the Tibetan community since November 2012

The Citizen Lab is pleased to announce the publication of A Call to Harm: New Malware Attacks Against the Syrian Opposition. This research report by Morgan Marquis-Boire and John Scott-Railton examines two recent cyber attacks targeting the Syrian opposition: malware masquerading as the circumvention tool Freegate and a campaign masquerading as a call to arms by a pro-opposition cleric.

On 12 June 2013, the Tibet Action Institute (TAI) hosted an event in Dharamsala, India, as part of their Safe Travels Online campaign.