From the arsenal of tools and tactics used for targeted surveillance, phishing remains one of the most common and insidious form of attack affecting civil society around the world. More and more Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) have become aware of these threats. Many have taken steps to increase their resilience to such tactics. These often include using more secure, privacy-respecting email providers, or enabling two-factor authentication on their online accounts.

Amnesty International is taking legal advice in order to revoke the export licence of Israeli-based NSO Group, after it was revealed the cyber firm’s spyware had been used in an attempt to spy on an Amnesty staff member.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, ACCESS NOW, REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS

The Security Lab at Amnesty International is a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, hackers, coders, campaigners and advocates working to protect civil society from unlawful digital surveillance, spyware and other human rights abuses enabled by technology.

By Danna Ingleton, Research and Policy Advisor at Amnesty International

In June 2018, an Amnesty International staff member received a malicious WhatsApp message with Saudi Arabia-related bait content and carrying links Amnesty International believes are used to distribute and deploy sophisticated mobile spyware. Through the course of our subsequent investigation we discovered that a Saudi activist based abroad had also received similar malicious messages. In its analysis of these messages, Amnesty International found connections with a network of over 600 domain names. Not only are these domain names suspicious, but they also overlap with infrastructure that had previously been identified as part of Pegasus, a sophisticated commercial exploitation and spyware platform sold by the Israel surveillance vendor, NSO Group.

An Amnesty International staff member has been targeted by a sophisticated surveillance campaign, in what the organization suspects was a deliberate attempt to spy on its staff by a government hostile to its work.

What’s the definition of encryption? Why should messaging apps use it to protect our personal chats, pics and videos? We explain all the technical terms and the jargon. 

Here are some top tips and tools to protect your privacy and guard against identity theft, financial fraud and your personal pics and messages getting into the wrong hands.

In particular, we’ve looked at whether they apply end-to-end encryption – a way of making your photos, videos and chats unintelligible to anyone but you and the people you’re talking to. This is how they fared.

This is what an activist in Belarus told me when I asked them about the reality of living with the threat of surveillance. I had travelled there to see for myself whether the human rights situation had improved after a huge crackdown on activists in 2010, and what role surveillance played in this, for a new Amnesty International report on this subject. I was surprised at first how many of my conversations with activists started out with people telling me they had “nothing to hide,” and were doing “nothing illegal.”

Belarus authorities are using phone networks run by some of the world’s biggest telecoms companies to stifle free speech and dissent, said Amnesty International in a report published today.