Robuta

Sep 1, 2020 - This brief describes malware ("GLASSES") sent in 2010 that is a simple downloader closely related to malware described by Mandiant in their APT1...

Jun 16, 2025 - ROME (AP) — Spyware from a U.S.-backed Israeli company was used to target the phones of at least three prominent journalists in Europe, two of

Apr 5, 2019 - Former Citizen Lab postdoctoral researcher Phillipa Gill has been named on the the "Top Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology Review.

Aug 26, 2020 - This report is the third in a series which analyzes regionally-based keyword censorship in LINE, a mobile messaging application developed by LINE Corporation....

Dec 12, 2024 - Arwa – who spent over a decade in public activism work in Yemen – played a crucial role in the 2011 Yemeni uprising. She attended protests, spoke at

Jun 23, 2020

Aug 26, 2020 - Additional evidence gathered by the Citizen Lab from Burma since the publication of Behind Blue Coat has provided further confirmation that Blue Coat’s...

May 13, 2024 - Findings from this study underscore that online and offline threats should not be viewed as separate phenomena, but rather as overlapping and mutually...

Nov 21, 2024 - In this report we analyze Windows and Android versions of web browser UC Browser, and find they transmitted personally identifiable information with easily...

Jan 24, 2025 - We analyze the system Amazon deploys on the US “amazon.com” storefront to restrict shipments of certain products to specific regions. We found 17,050...

Feb 2, 2021 - This report examines algorithmic technologies that are designed for use in criminal law enforcement systems, including a human rights and constitutional law...

Jul 6, 2017 - Cyber Stewards Network Partner Derechos Digitales has published a report in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, titled "Who Has Your...

Citizen Lab has 29 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Nov 21, 2024

Nov 25, 2020 - The Cyber Stewards Network is pleased to announce the release of a report titled “An Overview of Internet Infrastructure and Governance in the...

Jan 27, 2025 - Over the course of our multi-year investigation, we found that Dark Basin likely conducted commercial espionage on behalf of their clients against opponents...

Feb 3, 2025 - MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’...

May 19, 2022 - This document provides a summary of the Citizen Lab's WeChat surveillance research findings, as well as questions and answers from the resesearch team.

Jul 6, 2017 - The following is a statement from Citizen Lab Director, Ron Deibert, concerning a defamation suit recently filed, and then discontinued by Netsweeper against...

GOV/LAB Seed Project: What motivates a citizen to comply or not comply with state or non-state actors? Understanding what motivates compliance and how citizens...

Apr 20, 2018 - This report provides legal analysis, political context, and historical background on the Communications Security Establishment Act, included in Bill C-59.

Jun 23, 2020 - In this report we track a malware operation targeting members of the Tibetan Parliament that use the custom backdoor know as KeyBoy.

To support engaged scholarship and build a stronger evidence base, MIT GOV/LAB is supporting research on citizen engagement and government accountability.

Mar 19, 2025 - In our first investigation into Israel-based spyware company, Paragon Solutions, we begin to untangle multiple threads connected to the proliferation of...

Feb 17, 2026 - The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research unit at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. We apply our collective...

Jan 26, 2025 - This report demonstrates the technical underpinnings of how WeChat image censorship operates and suggests possible evasion strategies.

Oct 7, 2025

Mar 12, 2019

Apr 3, 2025 - In this interview with TVO The Agenda’s Steve Paikin, Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert discusses his recent trip to the White House, the impact that the...

Sep 1, 2020 - The Tibetan community is being targeted by email-based malware attacks that leverage the March 10 Tibetan Uprising anniversary as a theme.

Jan 26, 2025

Dec 12, 2024 - Meryem and her family left the Xinjiang region in China for Turkey in the early 1990s, before settling in North America. As a child, Meryem’s first exposure

Aug 26, 2020 - Updates on how LINE, KakaoTalk, OneDrive and Flickr are blocked in China. Analysis of security of FireChat and accessibility of the service in China.

Oct 17, 2025 - Moderators of online communities, often volunteers, work hard to protect their communities from harassment, misinformation, trolls, and other online harms. But...

Jul 19, 2023 - We find that mass DNA collection in Tibet is another mass DNA collection campaign conducted under the Xi Jinping administration (2012–present), along with...

Jul 8, 2017 - 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...

Jul 19, 2023 - Police led mass iris scan collection in Qinghai, a region with a population that is 49.4% non-Han, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Iris scan collection is...

Jun 23, 2020 - This report describes a malware operation against the Syrian Opposition. We name the operator Group5, and suspect they have not been previously-reported....

Dec 12, 2024 - Meron is Swedish-Eritrean who grew up in Sweden, where her parents were deeply involved in the Eritrean liberation movement. She moved back to Eritrea in 2002

Jun 24, 2020 - Investigation of a malware campaign targeting the Tibetan community and discussion of the challenges in analyzing closed espionage ecosystems.

Sep 13, 2024 - The Citizen Lab has sent an open letter to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of both Canada and Chile, as co-chairs of the Equal Rights Coalition (ERC), and Mr....

Apr 5, 2019 - Leandro Ucciferri on biometric technology and the identity we can't change

Oct 19, 2022 - Mexican digital rights organization R3D, with technical support from the Citizen Lab, has determined that Mexican journalists and a human rights defender were...

Feb 3, 2025

Mar 12, 2019 - Cyber Stewards Network Partner ICT Watch is one of 18 Indonesian organizations nominated for a World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) prize in 2017....

Jun 4, 2025 - On June 9, join the Citizen Lab’s Emile Dirks to discuss China’s influence, interference, and repression in Canada.

Nov 21, 2023

Jun 23, 2020 - In this research note, we analyze a malware campaign targeting Hong Kong democracy activists. Two new malware families are used in the campaign that we name...

Under what conditions do voters evaluate election candidates based on performance and programmatic considerations in dominant-party systems?

Jun 24, 2020 - This report reveals a campaign of reconnaissance, phishing, and malware operations that use content and domains made to mimic Chinese language news websites.

Jan 10, 2025 - This report examines the accessibility of certain types of content on VK (an abbreviation for “VKontakte”), a Russian social networking service, in Canada,...

Feb 11, 2026 - Through a multi-year investigation, we find that the Jordanian security apparatus has deployed forensic extraction products manufactured by Cellebrite against...

Jan 10, 2025 - We discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed....

Jun 9, 2025 - Irene Poetranto examines Indonesia’s use of domain name system (DNS) redirection as a method of internet censorship in a new essay published by the Carnegie

Apr 23, 2025 - This report performs the first public analysis of MMTLS, the main network protocol used by WeChat, an app with over one billion users. The report finds that...

Aug 15, 2022 - While analyzing the phone of a Saudi activist infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, we discovered a zero-day zero-click exploit against iMessage. The...

Sep 1, 2020 - This post analyzes targeted malware attacks against groups in the Tibetan diaspora and Hong Kong that leverage the CVE-2014-4114 vulnerability

May 8, 2020 - Documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of the Russian government were manipulated and then released as a “leak” to discredit domestic and...

Nov 21, 2024 - This report documents blocking of Kalachakra-related keywords on WeChat.

Jun 1, 2018 - This post describes the results of a comprehensive global Internet scan for the command and control servers of FinFisher’s surveillance software.

Nov 2, 2021 - The Citizen Lab, OutRight Action International, and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) collaborated to conduct research on LGBTIQ website...

Aug 19, 2022 - Candiru is a secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments. Using Internet scanning, we identified more than 750 websites linked...

Nov 10, 2021 - An investigation revealing that Mexican soda tax supporters were targeted with NSO Group's government-exclusive spyware and exploit framework.

Aug 25, 2025 - Join Citizen Lab founder and director Ron Deibert for a screening of the 1981 film “Blow Out” hosted by the Great Escape Bookstore.

Jul 8, 2017 - 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...

Dec 15, 2024 - COVID-KAYA, a platform used by frontline healthcare workers in the Philippines to collect and share COVID-19 cases with the Philippines Department of Health,...

Dec 12, 2024 - Fatima, a Syrian journalist, has been relentlessly harassed, threatened, and blacklisted for her work. She can hardly bear to think about Syria now, let alone

Apr 24, 2025 - A sustained, coordinated social media harassment and doxxing campaign – which we codenamed JUICYJAM – targeting the pro-democracy movement in Thailand has...

Dec 12, 2024 - Dounia Moustaslim (also known as Dounia Filali), a journalist in exile, was among the first to expose the Moroccan security apparatus’ use of spyware against

Oct 27, 2020 - This is the first documented case of one-click mobile exploits used to target Tibetan groups, and reflects an escalation in the sophistication of digital...

Oct 30, 2015 - The Citizen Lab is one of the winners of the 2015 Pioneer Award, awarded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Research brief for the Scholars Strategy Network on our suite of research projects on the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.

Citizen Lab and Amnesty link Cellebrite extractions and Predator spyware to surveillance of activists and journalists.

Jan 10, 2025 - In this report, we describe how activists and dissidents living in Canada are impacted by digital transnational repression. We conclude that digital...

Jan 22, 2025 - The Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) fosters research, outputs, and creative collaboration on repressive...