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Behind The Internet Habit

Decent Essays

Throughout 2016 AND 2017, individuals in Canada, United States, Germany, Norway, United Kingdom, and numerous other countries began to receive suspicious emails. It wasn’t just common spam. These people were chosen.

The emails were specifically designed to entice each individual to click a malicious link. Had the targets done so, their internet connections would have been hijacked and surreptitiously directed to servers laden with malware designed by a surveillance company in Israel. The spies who contracted the Israeli company’s services would have been able to monitor everything those targets did on their devices, including remotely activating the camera and microphone.

Who was behind this global cyber espionage campaign? Was it the …show more content…

Many of the countries in which the targets live—the United States, Canada, and Germany, among others—have strict wiretapping laws that make it illegal to eavesdrop without a warrant. It seems individuals in Ethiopia broke those laws.

If a government wants to collect evidence on a person in another country, it is customary for it to make a formal legal request to other governments through a process like the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. Ethiopia appears to have sidestepped all of that. International norms would suggest a formal démarche to Ethiopia from the governments whose citizens it monitored without permission, but that may happen quietly if at all.

Our team reverse-engineered the malware used in this instance, and over time this allowed us to positively identify the company whose spyware was being employed by Ethiopia: Cyberbit Solutions, a subsidiary of the Israel-based homeland security company Elbit Systems. Notably, Cyberbit is the fourth company we have identified, alongside Hacking Team, Finfisher, and NSO Group, whose products and services have been abused by autocratic regimes to target dissidents, journalists, and others. Along with NSO Group, it’s the second Israel-based company whose technology has been used in this way.

Israel does regulate the export of commercial spyware abroad, although apparently not very well from a human-rights perspective. Cyberbit was able to sell its services to

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