Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton speaks with TechCrunch about the proliferation of spyware use, and the effects it has on democracy. While it is ostensibly used to monitor criminals, Scott-Railton says that government spyware “needs to be treated like the threat to democracy and elections that it is.”
Read more in TechCrunch.
In May 2025, Keir Giles, a well-known expert on Russian military operations, was targeted with a highly sophisticated and personalized phishing attack. Using a method not previously observed by the Citizen Lab, the attacker posed as a U.S. State Department employee to convince Mr. Giles to create and send app-specific passwords for his email accounts, bypassing multi-factor authentication. Google spotted and blocked the attack, attributing it to a Russian state-backed operator.
