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.

This blog post reports on a malware attack in which a compromised version of Kakao Talk, an Android-based mobile messaging client, was sent in a highly-targeted email to a prominent individual in the Tibetan community. The malware is designed to send a user’s contacts, SMS message history, and cellular network location to attackers. This post was updated on 18 April 2013.

In this research brief, Seth Hardy describes malware (“GLASSES”) sent in 2010 that is a simple downloader closely related to malware described by Mandiant in their APT1 report. GLASSES appears to be a previous version of malware called GOGGLES by Mandiant, and was sent in a highly targeted email to a Tibetan human rights organization, demonstrating that APT1 is involved in more than just industrial and corporate espionage.