For Their Eyes Only: The Changing Face of Online Spying
Morgan Marquis Boire
01/02/2013– Ore 14.30 - Aula Magna del Politecnico di Milano, Italy
The so-called "Arab Spring" saw politically and economically disenfranchised
citizens take advantage of new tools such as social media and smartphones to
break the state’s monopoly on information, and mobilize mass protest. While
governments were quick to employ familiar, time-tested mechanisms of repression
against demonstrators in the streets and main squares, they fumbled at first in
controlling this new digital dissent.
Against an increasingly security-aware online community, the traditional tools
of blocking, filtering, and wiretapping had become less effective. Nervous
regimes turned to the largely unregulated $5 billion a year industry in
Internet surveillance tools. Once the realm of the black market and
intelligence agencies, the latest computer spyware is now sold at trade shows
for dictator pocket change.
Activists and journalists soon found themselves the target of e-mails promising
exclusive or scandalous information. Marquis-Boire and his team analyzed
messages forwarded to them by suspicious users, and found spyware products
apparently from Gamma International and Hacking Team, recognized players in the
surveillance industry. For the first time, they analyzed their products,
chasing internet addresses and shell corporations across the globe. As they
published their findings, servers disappeared, and spyware was rewritten.
This talk will detail the cat and mouse game between authoritarian regimes and
dissidents, as well as ongoing efforts to map out the relationship between
surveillance software companies and governments.
Morgan Marquis-Boire works as a Security Engineer at Google specializing in
Incident Response, Forensics and Malware Analysis. He is a security researcher
and Technical Advisor at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs,
University of Toronto (More information
here:https://citizenlab.org/author/mmboire/) . Recently, he has been working
with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on issues surrounding dissident
suppression in Syria (Most
recent:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/new-blackshades-malware).
A frequent speaker at events around the world such as Black Hat, DefCON, FIRST,
and ICANN, his work has been featured in numerous print and online publications
including Bloomberg Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The
BBC and The New York Times. He received an honorable mention from SC Magazine
as one of the influential minds of IT Security in 2012. He was also one of the
original organizers of the KiwiCON conference in New Zealand.
More information at: http://www.techandlaw.net/talks/
The event will be held in English. No Italian translation foreseen.
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