On December 6, 2017, Citizen Lab released their new report entitled “Champing at the Cyberbait,” which exposed a new commercial spyware being used to target Oromo dissidents living abroad. Citizen Lab reported that the targeted activists had received emails with a URL imitating a video portal; when clicked, the user was asked to install an Adobe Flash update, or to install the fake app “Adobe PdfWriter,” both of which contained the spyware. This is not the first time the Ethiopian regime has been caught surveilling activists. In 2015, Citizen Lab found that Ethiopia’s Information Network Security Agency (INSA) used spyware to surveil journalists working for the independent media outlet Ethiopian Satellite Television Service (ESAT). Find more of Citizen Lab’s research about online attacks against Ethiopian civil society here.

Director of the CItizen Lab, Ron Deibert, was recently named one of Foreign Policy’s 2017 Global Thinkers and is a World Movement Steering Committee member.