Sunday, February 23, 2014

RCS Spyware and Citizen Lab

Remote-Controlled System (RCS) is a piece of spyware sold exclusively to governments by a Milan company called Hacking Team. Recently, Citizen Lab found this spyware being used by the Ethiopian government against journalists, including American journalists.
More recently, Citizen Lab mapped the software and who's using it:
Hacking Team advertises that their RCS spyware is "untraceable" to a specific government operator. However, we claim to identify a number of current or former government users of the spyware by pinpointing endpoints, and studying instances of RCS that we have observed. We suspect that agencies of these twenty-one governments are current or former users of RCS: Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, and Uzbekistan.
Both articles on the Citizen Lab website are worth reading; the details are fascinating. And more are coming.
Finally, congratulations to Citizen Lab for receiving a 2014 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, along with the $1M prize. This organization is one of the good guys, and I'm happy to see it get money to continue its work.

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