[liberationtech] New Citizen Lab report: Permission To Spy

[Ronald Deibert]

Dear LibTech

I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report:
Permission to Spy: An Analysis of Android Malware Targeting Tibetans

April 1, 2013

Key Findings

A compromised version of Kakao Talk, an Android-based mobile messaging client, was sent in a highly-targeted email to a prominent individual in the Tibetan community.
This email message repurposed a legitimate private email message sent by an information security expert in the Tibetan community to a member of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile.
This malware is designed to send a user’s contacts, SMS message history, and cellular network location to attackers.
The cellular network information gathered by this malware would only be useful to actors with detailed knowledge of the cellular communication provider’s technical infrastructure.
The compromised application was not detected as malware by any of the three mobile malware scanning applications we tested.
Full report is here:
https://citizenlab.org/2013/04/permission-to-spy-an-analysis-of-android-malware-targeting-tibetans/

There is a Forbes news article about the report here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/01/evidence-mounts-that-chinese-government-hackers-spread-android-malware/

Regards
Ron

Ronald Deibert
Director, the Citizen Lab 
and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies
Munk School of Global Affairs
University of Toronto
(416) 946-8916
PGP: http://deibert.citizenlab.org/pubkey.txt
http://deibert.citizenlab.org/
twitter.com/citizenlab
r.deibert at utoronto.ca



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