Category Archives: Citizen Lab

Malware campaign that targeted Tibet’s diaspora linked to wider operation

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A malware campaign earlier this year against members of Tibet’s diaspora was part of a wider operation that also targeted governments and industries in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a new report released Wednesday by Citizen Lab.  The malware campaign, active from January into March, targeted Tibetan activists and journalists, members of the Tibetan Parliament in exile and the India-based Central Tibetan Administration, according to Citizen Lab. Relying heavily on low-cost spearphishing techniques, the anonymous attackers disguised malicious PowerPoint and Microsoft Rich Text Format documents as links from human rights NGOs.  According to the report, the Tibetan malware targets, wary of unsolicited emails, forwarded the messages to Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto-based interdisciplinary laboratory that specializes in human rights and security.  The attacks are similar to a 2016 malware campaign nicknamed the “Parliamentary Campaign” by Citizen Lab. It also targeted parliamentarians. The number of Tibetans in exile is estimated at more than […]

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Report: Powerful spyware used to target Amnesty International employee and Saudi activist

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An Amnesty International employee and Saudi Arabian activist were targeted with what appears to be commercial spyware only sold to governments. In a lengthy blog post released Wednesday, London-based Amnesty International revealed that a suspicious message with a malicious link was sent to an employee. Citizen Lab, a Canadian research organization, helped analyze the incident and posted its own set of findings, which corroborated Amnesty’s report. Both suggest that the malicious messages bore the marks of Pegasus, a highly sophisticated commercial spyware and exploitation tool sold by NSO Group, a secretive Israeli surveillance company that only sells its highly proprietary wares to authorized governments. In June, an Amnesty employee received a WhatsApp message in Arabic with Saudi Arabia-related content and a malicious link. Earlier this summer, a Saudi human rights activist living abroad also received SMS messages with a similar link. Neither were opened. Had the recipients clicked the links, researchers believe that they […]

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Chinese Government Forces Residents To Install Surveillance App With Awful Security

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Last year, authorities told residents of a Muslim-populated part of China to install JingWang, an app that scans for certain files. Now, researchers have found it transfers the collected data with no encryption. Continue reading Chinese Government Forces Residents To Install Surveillance App With Awful Security→

It’s super cheap to launch an effective cyber-espionage scheme

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Putting together a thorough cyber-espionage campaign in order to spy on hundreds of people can be surprisingly inexpensive, new research by Citizen Lab explains and private sector cybersecurity experts agree. Over the course of nearly two years, Citizen Lab estimated that a hacking group possibly linked to the Chinese government had spent $1,068 in order to stand up computer systems that were used to target people primarily linked to Tibet; an autonomous territory bordering Nepal and Bhutan that is loosely controlled by the Chinese government. This activity illustrates to some degree how in certain environments, largely because of poor digital security practices, an attacker can run an effective yet rudimentary scheme to collect intelligence from multiple organizations all at once. Experts say that while Citizen Lab’s findings are not unique, it paints a picture of how cheap and scalable hacking techniques — including email phishing and web exploit kits — are part […]

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