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Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ’Zero-Click’ Exploit - 21 décembre 2020
Summary & Key Findings
In July and August 2020, government operatives used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack 36 personal phones belonging to journalists, producers, anchors, and executives at Al Jazeera. The personal phone of a journalist at London-based Al Araby TV was also hacked.
The phones were (...)
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To Surveil and Predict - 14 septembre 2020
This report examines algorithmic technologies that are designed for use in criminal law enforcement systems. Algorithmic policing is an area of technological development that, in theory, is designed to enable law enforcement agencies to either automate surveillance or to draw inferences through the use of mass (...)
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Dark Basin : Uncovering a Massive Hack-For-Hire Operation - 8 août 2020
Key Findings
Dark Basin is a hack-for-hire group that has targeted thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions on six continents. Targets include advocacy groups and journalists, elected and senior government officials, hedge funds, and multiple industries.
Dark Basin extensively targeted American (...)
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Censored Contagion : How Information on the Coronavirus is Managed on Chinese Social Media - The Citizen Lab - 8 mars 2020
The coronavirus disease, officially termed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), is an epidemic that surfaced in Wuhan city, in central China’s Hubei province, in early December 2019. As of March 2, 2020, COVID-19 had reached 65 countries and infected over 88,000 people. The WHO has declared the virus a (...)
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Stopping the Press : New York Times Journalist Targeted by Saudi-linked Pegasus Spyware Operator - The Citizen Lab - 5 février 2020
Key Findings
New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard was targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware via a June 2018 SMS message promising details about “Ben Hubbard and the story of the Saudi Royal Family.”
The SMS contained a hyperlink to a website used by a Pegasus operator that we call KINGDOM. We have linked (...)
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Tibetan Groups Targeted with 1-Click Mobile Exploits - 2 octobre 2019
The Tibetan community has been besieged by digital espionage for over a decade. In 2009, the Information Warfare Monitor published the report Tracking GhostNet, detailing a targeted malware operation that spied on Tibetan organisations including the Private Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, (...)
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The Predator in Your Pocket - 17 juin 2019
A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry
Persons who engage in technology-facilitated violence, abuse, and harassment sometimes install spyware on a targeted person’s mobile phone. Spyware has a wide range of capabilities, including pervasive monitoring of text and chat messages, (...)
Litigation and Other Formal Complaints Concerning Targeted Digital Surveillance and the Digital Surveillance Industry - 12 décembre 2018
This is a living resource document providing links and descriptions to litigation and other formal complaints concerning digital surveillance and the digital surveillance industry. If you have additional resources to add to this document, please send to Siena Anstis : siena [at] citizen lab [dot] ca. This document (...)
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Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries - 13 novembre 2018
Between August 2016 and August 2018, we scanned the Internet for servers associated with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. We found 1,091 IP addresses that matched our fingerprint and 1,014 domain names that pointed to them. We developed and used Athena, a novel technique to cluster some of our matches into 36 distinct (...)
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How a Canadian permanent resident and Saudi Arabian dissident was targeted with powerful spyware on Canadian soil - 24 octobre 2018
Following a Citizen Lab report that identified the presence of NSO’s Pegasus spyware technology in Quebec, researchers contacted Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi Arabian dissident and Canadian permanent resident who has long been critical of the regime in Riyadh. After an extensive investigation, they discovered that his (...)
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Bots at the Gate - 27 septembre 2018
A Human Rights Analysis of Automated Decision Making in Canada’s Immigration and Refugee System
A new report from the Citizen Lab and the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law investigates the use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making in Canada’s (...)
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(Can’t) Picture This - 18 août 2018
An Analysis of Image Filtering on WeChat Moments
WeChat, (Weixin 微信 in Chinese), is the dominant chat application in China and fourth largest in the world. In February 2018, WeChat reportedly hit one billion monthly active users during the Chinese Lunar New Year. The application is owned and operated by Tencent, (...)
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How WeChat Filters Images for One Billion Users - 16 août 2018
With over 1 billion monthly users, WeChat boasts the title of most popular chat application in China and the fourth largest in the world. However, a new report by Citizen Lab researchers reveals exactly how the platform is able to censor images sent by these billion users.
Building on previous research which (...)
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How government-exclusive spyware is used to surveil civil society in Mexico - 23 juin 2018
In Mexico, government-exclusive spyware technology is being used to target journalists, human rights defenders, anti-corruption advocates, and international investigators. Luis Fernando Garcia, Director of R3D, explains how technology meant to track terrorists is being turned against (...)
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Bad Traffic - 10 mars 2018
Sandvine’s PacketLogic Devices Used to Deploy Government Spyware in Turkey and Redirect Egyptian Users to Affiliate Ads ?
This report describes our investigation into the apparent use of Sandvine/Procera Networks Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to deliver nation-state malware in Turkey and indirectly into (...)
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What do companies know about you ? - 12 février 2018
When you use your mobile phone, your geolocation can be recorded by your cell phone provider based your phone’s proximity to the providers’ cell phone towers. Online dating applications may retain your personal messages and photos even after you think they been deleted. Fitness tracking companies can be subpoenaed (...)
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Spying on a Budget - 1er février 2018
Inside a Phishing Operation with Targets in the Tibetan Community
Civil society groups around the world are persistently targeted by digital espionage operations designed to collect sensitive information on their communications and activities. Activists, humanitarians, and journalists often work in distributed (...)
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Serious Vulnerabilities Discovered in South Korean Parental Apps - 13 septembre 2017
As parents all over the world review back-to-school safety tips with their kids, researchers have revealed serious security vulnerabilities in South Korean child filtering apps that may leave some parents asking : are our kids safer without them ?
Researchers from Citizen Lab, Cure53, and OpenNet Korea conducted (...)
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Director of Mexican Anti-Corruption Group Targeted with NSO Group’s Spyware - 3 septembre 2017
Since 2016, Citizen Lab and our partners R3D, SocialTic, and Article 19 have been conducting an investigation into the abuse of NSO Group’s government-exclusive spyware in Mexico. In six prior reports, published between August 2016 and August 2017, we identified abusive and potentially illegal infection attempts (...)
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Keyword Censorship in Chinese Mobile Games - 17 août 2017
How are applications and social media controlled in China ? Who decides what content is censored and how are these controls implemented ? Censorship in China is often portrayed as a centralized top-down system of control directly managed by the government. But peering inside this system reveals a more fragmented (...)
