Ethiopian state-sponsored hackers have been uncovered attempting to compromise the data of American journalists in Washington D.C. It has been revealed by researchers that they have been making use of the RCS spyware to monitor journalists who cover Ethiopian affairs from afar.
Last December, journalist Neamin Zeleke received an email in his mailbox that contained suspicious information about the elections that were to be held in May 2015. According to researchers at *Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Italian vendor Hacking Team has sold off a commercial spying tool to the Ethiopian government that appear as a Microsoft Word file back in 2013. Zeleke’s colleague’s desktop was infected with that malware when he tried to open that file. This time around Zeleke received the email and had the presence of mind to forward the message to researchers at Citizen Lab.
*The Citizen is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Canada. Founded and directed by Professor Ronald Deibert, the Citizen Lab studies information controls—such as network surveillance and content filtering—that impact the openness and security of the Internet and that pose threats to human rights.
0 comments:
Post a Comment