Free Republic

Google and internet rights groups have called on Congress to weigh in on spyware, asking for sanctions and increased enforcement against so-called legit surveillanceware makers. During an open House Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, US lawmakers heard testimony from Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton; Shane Huntley, who leads Google's Threat Analysis Group; and Carine Kanimba, whose father was the inspiration for Hotel Rwanda and who was, herself, targeted by Pegasus spyware. This, of course, is the now-infamous malware that its developer, Israel's NSO Group, claims is only sold to legitimate government agencies — not private companies or individuals. Once...

Microsoft search engine Bing censors terms deemed sensitive in China from its autosuggestion feature internationally, according to research from Citizen Lab. The University of Toronto research organization analyzed the search engine's autosuggestion system for censorship of nearly 100,000 names in the United States, Canada and China in both English letters and Chinese characters. Testing was done by modifying region settings, language setting and IP address geolocation. Microsoft responded to a notification from Citizen Lab, and called [PDF] the lack of autofill terms a "technical error" and said they'd resolved the issue. The Citizen Lab group claims it found that censored...

Apple released an emergency software update Monday after it discovered a vulnerability that would allow hackers to infect iPhones, iPads, Apple computers and watches without a user even clicking a malicious link. The spyware detected could open up an Apple device to data theft and eavesdropping. The flaw was detected by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who noticed spyware from the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire firm, NSO Group, had infected the iPhone of a Saudi activist. It was the first time a so-called “zero-click” exploit had been caught and analyzed, said the researchers, who found the malicious...

TORONTO, ON – The Information Warfare Monitor (Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and the SecDev Group, Ottawa) and the Shadowserver Foundation announce the release of Shadows in the Cloud: An investigation into cyber espionage 2.0. The report documents a complex ecosystem of cyber espionage that systematically targeted and compromised computer systems in India, the Offices of the Dalai Lama, the United Nations, and several other countries. Members of the research team are holding a news conference at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 6, to discuss their latest findings and to answer questions from the media....