Security

With U.S. airstrike in Syria, potential for conflict with Russia is “immense,” says U of T political scientist

ullahnor — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 21:10:05 +0000

With U.S. airstrike in Syria, potential for conflict with Russia is “immense,” says U of T political scientist

ullahnor Fri, 04/07/2017 - 17:10

Cutline

DigitalGlobe imagery of the Shayrat Air Base in Syria, following the U.S. airstrike (photo credit to DigitalGlobe/Getty Images)

Noreen Ahmed-Ullah

Author legacy

Noreen Ahmed-Ullah

Topic

Global Lens

Trump

Global

International

Security

The United States fired 59 Tomahawk missiles on Thursday at an air base in Syria.

The U.S. said the airstrike on the base focused on a target responsible for the chemical weapons attack earlier this week, in which more than 80 Syrians in a rebel-held area were killed.

The Russians, who were in the area of the U.S. airstrike, were given 90 minutes’ notice of the attack by the U.S. On Friday, the Kremlin denounced Trump's airstrike.

U of T News spoke with political scientist Ryan Hurl of U of T Scarborough about the strike and what this means for U.S.-Russia relations and global security.

What do you believe is behind Trump’s airstrike, especially considering it was risking his relationship with Russia?

President Trump must believe that the risk of antagonizing Russia is less than the risk of inaction – in particular, allowing states to believe that chemical weapons can be used without consequence.

For the United States to establish “red lines” regarding the use of certain weapons, and to then do nothing when the line is crossed, does not do very much to advance the interests of the United States.

Perhaps the Trump administration is acting on the assumption that its various overtures to Russia – the notion that American interests and Russian interests can be reconciled sometimes – have purchased them some degree of goodwill?

What will this do to American relations with Russia?

The potential for conflict is immense, and this is by far the greatest concern raised by the intervention.

But it is too early to draw conclusions about what the consequences will be in terms of Russian-American relations – too early for me, at any rate.

Russia has said this is good news for terrorists – what will a push to remove Bashar al-Assad from power mean for stability in the region?

It is very difficult to perceive what “the best case scenario” would look like if Assad is removed.

On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine the likely scenario. There is no “government in waiting” ready to replace Assad. The rebel movements are composed of a variety of squabbling groups, many of them made up of radicals and jihadists.

Removing Assad will not alleviate the ethnic, religious and political grievances that divide Syrians. In other words, it is difficult to see how removing Assad would improve political stability in the region.

Trudeau meets Trump: U of T experts on what's at stake for Canada

ullahnor — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 21:36:11 +0000

Trudeau meets Trump: U of T experts on what's at stake for Canada

ullahnor Mon, 02/13/2017 - 16:36

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House today (photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Topic

University of Toronto experts spoke with reporters ahead of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump today, discussing the Canada-U.S. relationship.

Irvin Studin, editor of the Canadian foreign policy magazine Global Brief and a researcher at U of T's School of Public Policy & Governance, said in a CBC Radio interview that Canada has been stuck in America's shadow for too long, and it's now time for us to think for ourselves.

“We're going to have to take some decisions,” Studin said on CBC's The 180. “Some of them will be aligned with American decision-making, but it will be very unsentimentally in our national interest. In the short term, whereas the Americans have been picking off Canadian talent, consciously and unconsciously over the last 70 years, now is an opportunity for us to do the reverse.

“We must be very unsentimental about it. We should be picking off American talent across the sectors. In sciences, in culture, in business, and everything in between. This is an opportunity for Canada to create some of the strategic bulwark to think for itself.”

While we don't share a border with Latin America like the United States, we do share borders with China and Russia, Studin said.

“Another way of looking at it is these are Great Powers at our borders this century, and they're going to squeeze us if we don't bulk up and think for ourselves,” he said.

Watching the watchers: U of T’s Ron Deibert blazing new trails with the Citizen Lab

ullahnor — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 19:44:57 +0000

Watching the watchers: U of T’s Ron Deibert blazing new trails with the Citizen Lab

ullahnor Sun, 12/04/2016 - 14:44

Cutline

Ron Deibert heads the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs (photo by Riley Stewart)

Jennifer Robinson

Author legacy

Jennifer Robinson

Topic

Global Lens

Citizen Lab

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Security

Ron Deibert

Faculty of Arts & Science

Political Science

Faculty of Arts & Science professor Ron Deibert is director of the Citizen Lab, a “hacktivist hothouse” that is internationally renowned for detecting abuses of power online.

Cybercrime is a serious problem, but governments deploying the tools of cybercrime for political repression and control are an existential threat. In 2009, Deibert and the Citizen Lab, located at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs, made headlines around the world for their role in exposing GhostNet, a massive espionage ring that had compromised the computer networks of civil rights organizations and the government agencies of dozens of countries.

Deibert’s team made global headlines again in August 2016, after human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor showed them a suspicious text message. They discovered an exploit designed to remotely jailbreak and spy on iPhones, prompting Apple to issue a rapid security update.

Read Deibert talking about China

Deibert was awarded a 2013 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for recognizing and mitigating the “growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide,” but he says there is still much more to do.

“Targeted digital attacks are a silent epidemic that threaten us all. We need to work together to protect cyberspace as an open and secure forum for free expression and access to information for all citizens.”

Deibert recently spoke with U of T News reporter Jennifer Robinson about his journey in “lifting the lid” on the Internet, as well as what the future holds for the pioneering work of the Citizen Lab.

Professor Ron Deibert (left) and Citizen Lab researcher Adam Senft (photo by Riley Stewart)

What is the Citizen Lab and what kind of research does it do?

The Citizen Lab is a research lab that I found in 2001. Our mission is to document information control that impacts the openness and security of the Internet and threatens human rights.

We produce evidence-based research on cyber-security issues that are associated with human rights concerns like tracking Internet censorship, documenting cyber-espionage attacks against civil society networks and carefully analyzing privacy and security risks associated with widely used applications and services.

You’ve had some recent successes that have gotten a lot of attention. For example, I know there was a piece in The New York Times not too long ago. Can you tell us about some of the big successes that your lab and researchers have had?

We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of media interest in our reporting – something like 13 separate reports of ours over the last eight years have been featured on the front pages of either The New York Times, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail or Toronto Star, which I think is probably an unparalleled track record.

One recent one that I think you might be referring to concerned our research into a targeted digital attack on the human rights defender in the United Arab Emirates. We did a technical analysis of a link that was sent over SMS [text message] to this human rights defender who shared it with our researchers. They were able to determine he was being targeted by an Israeli company called the NSO Group, which had apparently been contracted for services by the United Arab Emirates security service.

When we analyzed the attack, we discovered it involved three separate, what are known as, zero day or unpatched vulnerabilities in his iPhone operating system. Those are extraordinarily rare, precious commodities worth millions of dollars each. When we discovered it, we reported it to Apple resulting in a patch of not only the iOS but OSX and Safari, as well, for probably close to a billion people worldwide. That was an unusually big impact from our research but like I said we’re fortunate to receive a lot of media attention for the work that we do.

We often hear that Canadians don’t care all that much about the privacy of their information. Why should people care about the work you do with the Citizen Lab?

Well, the aim of our research is, to put it metaphorically, to lift the lid on the Internet or cyberspace or the big data universe or whatever you want to call it that surrounds us and within which we communicate. It’s essentially the new environment in which we live and for most users there’s very little recognition of what goes on beneath the surface of this environment.

It is important to lift the lid on the Internet and see what goes on underneath the surface because often that’s where decisions are made and power is exercised, hidden from the view of the average Internet user. A simple analogy would be the terms of service that few people actually read may constrain what you can do online or with certain applications.

Then going further, when we reverse-engineer applications we sometimes find there’s hidden surveillance or content filtering that applications many hundreds of millions of people use affect and structure what they can do and this is sometimes being done at the request of government. For example, our work on Chinese live streaming and mobile browser application has found extensive Internet censorship and surveillance hidden in the application.

The Citizen Lab seems to involve collaborations among a wide variety of different faculties and people with expertise at U of T. Can you give us an example of some of the different groups you work with here?

Within U of T, we’ve had some pretty fruitful collaborations with students and researches from computer science ad electrical engineering and the Faculty of Information Studies.

Outside the University of Toronto, we have partnerships with researchers from most disciplines in universities ranging from Princeton, Berkeley, Harvard, Cambridge and others.

The importance of this type of mixed methods approach to the topic can’t be stressed enough. It’s one of those areas that requires being able to incorporate methods and techniques from not only computer science and engineering but also law and social sciences.

We also work a lot with groups in the developing world – sometimes advocacy groups, sometimes researchers – because a growing number of Internet users come from the global south and that’s where I think the most important challenges are.

Here in Canada, it may feel like we’re communicating using infrastructure developed here in North America, but the reality is now and into the future, we’re going to be communicating on terms largely determined elsewhere primarily within innovation centres in the global south. So we really need to understand the political context within which that technological development is occurring because it’s going to affect us down the road.

When you started the Citizen Lab in 2001 was there anything else like it? And are you starting to see similar operations set up at other universities in the world now?

When I started there were very few other centres that I can think of that were doing exactly what we aim to do.

Now, it certainly is a growing community of researchers of which we’re a part, and we try to help spearhead that through our collaborations, workshops and our annual summer institute, which was seeded by the Connaught Fund and now is self-sustaining thanks to our funders who recognize the importance of this event. We bring together researchers who are working on the information controls from the next methods perspective. We’ve had hundreds of researchers from dozens of universities attend this annual event and because of that we’re seeing now centres like the Citizen Lab sprouting up different universities.

You're a professor of political science at the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs. What made you in 2001 come up with this idea?

My area of expertise in political science has been international security with a special focus on information technology.

Early in my career, I was very much interested in how intelligence agencies operate and looking at the methods that they employ, especially signals intelligence. It dawned on me that there is no analogue in the civil society world. By that I mean, you know watching government, watching the watchers so to speak, wasn’t very well developed.

Meanwhile in academia, approaches to the Internet were really siloed. You had engineers and computer science experts working on technical issues, political scientists to social
scientists looking at policy issues and not understanding the technology.

I was lucky to receive a grant from the Ford Foundation in 2000. They asked me to put together a project proposal. I had this idea to build a lab where I would bring together or recruit researchers from computer science and engineering, take their tradecraft and skills to set up something like a civil society counter-intelligence capacity.

At the beginning this sounded like a lot of hubris – and it was – but now we’ve come close to building that sort of capacity. It’s really rewarding to see how it has evolved.

What comes next? What would you like the University of Toronto to do next with the Citizen Lab?

I think we’re very fortunate to have funders who recognize the work that we do and most of our grants are of the general support variety. In other words, we don’t have to put in project grants. We received a large endowment – a $1-million-dollar award – from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013 that we hope to build upon.

Of course, an issue for the Citizen Lab is sustainability and also succession because it really is a professor’s lab. It’s not a centre or an institute in the way we think about those terms in the university environment. If it’s going to sustain itself beyond my career then I have to start thinking about succession and putting in that foundation for long-term sustainability.

If anyone, say in the developing world, that’s involved in human rights work feels like they’re being watched, what’s the best way to get in touch with you guys?

We get a lot of outside contact from many people who read about our work or are worried about something they read in the news, like maybe the Snowden disclosures or some kind of surveillance happening. We’re overwhelmed with types of requests for a small research lab. We’re not a service organization. We can’t receive inquiries from the public and investigate every concern that comes our way. I wish we could but it’s just not within our capacity.

But there is a community of human rights groups, advocacy groups and technology groups of which we’re a part, and we can point people in the right direction so if anyone has concerns they can definitely contact us at info@citizenlab.ca. We’d hopefully steer them in the right direction.

Ron Deibert’s Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs is just one example of extraordinary innovation and impact at U of T. Learn more at utoronto.ca/uoft-world.

Citizen Lab experts say latest hacking highlights security, regulation vulnerabilities

Romi Levine — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:10:57 +0000

Citizen Lab experts say latest hacking highlights security, regulation vulnerabilities

Romi Levine Fri, 08/26/2016 - 13:10

Cutline

(Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

Global Lens

Citizen Lab

Security

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Cyber-Espionage

Global

Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton made headlines around the world this week when they disclosed serious iPhone security flaws after an attempted attack on the phone of the prominent human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor through a link in a text message. Scott-Railton and Marczak are senior researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. With the help of mobile security firm Lookout, they traced the link back to a company called NSO Group that sells access to these vulnerabilities to their clients.

Read about the report here

Read the full report here

U of T News writer Romi Levine spoke with Scott-Railton and with his Citizen Lab colleague Sarah McKune about the incident and about the murky territory that surrounds regulating companies like the NSO group.

John Scott-Railton

Lookout’s vice president, research called the NSO group at the centre of the Citizen Lab report a “cyber arms dealer” – what does he mean by that?

This is an interesting way to describe it. We’re in a geopolitical situation – there’s a market desire from countries that don’t have the ability to build the capability domestically to do digital surveillance. They go looking to the private market. There are a series of companies that are looking to sell them those capabilities. These are companies that are selling kinds of tools governments want for espionage and law enforcement.

Some accuse these companies of being mercenaries. It raises the question of proliferation – how do you decide whether or not to sell to a country? Part of our work at Citizen Lab is based around shedding light on that marketplace and to show clear evidence into whether or not there are abuses.

Are companies like the NSO group doing something illegal?

Some people believe that the way to solve the problem of proliferation is for governments to have export control regulations that require that any sale of this kind of technology is required to get a license and go through a process of evaluation.

The challenge seems to be, even though many of these frameworks exist, it’s still the case these companies are selling spyware technology to countries with notorious histories of serial misuse of this kind of spyware.

It raises the obvious question: If that’s not enough to stop a sale, what would stop a sale?

Ahmed Mansoor has now been targeted three times with this kind of technology from three different companies. If this isn’t evidence of serial misuse, I don’t know what is.

“Zero-day exploits” would have allowed NSO group to jailbreak Mansoor’s phone. What are they?

Zero day vulnerability is something that the vendor – in this case Apple – has spent zero days working to close. It basically means this is a hole or a bug in a product or software that can be exploited to run malicious code. This is very powerful knowledge because it gets you around the kind of security that you would expect to be built into products.
There’s a market for this kind of knowledge because it represents information about where these secret unlocked doors are that could potentially be very valuable.
There’s also a market for intrusion tools that could be used on top of that.

So vulnerability is like a secret door, the exploit is a set of instructions that get you in the door and the malware is what you put inside once you gain access.

Should the average person see Mansoor’s hacking as a threat to their own privacy?

The attacks we work on at Citizen Lab tend to be targeted at high-value individuals. It is not necessarily something everyone should be instantly afraid of.
But we at Citizen Lab think activists, dissidents and journalists are canaries in the coal mine – this targeting shows us a glimpse of a future where if this kind of market is not in some way addressed, this kind of vulnerability will be more and more part of the daily conversation.

When you target dissidents and journalists you’re not just targeting individuals, you’re targeting the democratic process and the people who help contribute to a fairer and more just and honest society – both because of the direct violence it does to civil societies and because of what it shows us about the future and the risks that will come.

Follow Scott-Railton’s digital security advice

How can someone recognize this kind of threat?

The sophistication of this threat is that it’s hard to recognize. Our advice to the general population is treat links and attachments especially from people you don’t know with great care. With the kinds of threats we see, like in the case of Mansoor, we see the critical importance of companies like Apple quickly responding to security threats we report to them.

Sarah McKune

How are companies like the NSO group regulated?

The regulatory area that’s been explored so far is that of export control. It’s the first step because export controls include a framework devoted to compliance and there can be penalties if you violate the applicable export control violations.

There's a multilateral export control group called the Wassenaar Arrangement – it includes over 40 countries including Canada, the United States and Russia, but it does not include Israel (where the NSO Group is based). But Israel incorporates the regulations that are agreed upon in the Waassenaar framework.

Export controls are a very arcane and language-specific beast. The arrangement lists different items that are subject to control implemented on the national levels. Individual nations implement those controls.

One of the controls that was added in December of 2013 related specifically to intrusion software. What NSO Group offers does seem to meet the criteria to be considered one of the items. That’s the crux of the issue – how these controls are implemented.

(If a product falls under the criteria, it’s) not an outright ban, you need to submit a license application and the authorities will grant or deny it.

We just don’t have visibility into the process with respect to NSO Group. It’s possible they may have submitted a request to a licensing application. It’s also possible a request has been granted.
The UAE has significant problems with respect to human rights including a track record of surveillance so it seems that if the authorities did engage in this review of the license application, those human rights concerns were not determined on the decision to grant the application if it was indeed granted .

So there’s no form of regulation one country can enforce on another country?

That demonstrates the limitation of export controls. They aren’t enough to address the human rights concerns associated with these technologies.

We have to start thinking beyond export controls to what other avenues are available.

What other ways are there to address these regulatory issues?

It involves a number of different facets.

We can look at the applicable laws relevant to this type of activity – there are some criminal laws that could apply to this type of context.

We can also look at consumer protection – this is certainly an issue of fraud perpetrated against individual users. Websites and other components of these types of spyware kits often attempt to mislead users as to what it is they’re trying to access and download.

There are legal and policy options on the table – legislatiures need to tackle this issue.

It is very complex but I do think this case demonstrates how vulnerable these types of technologies render users at large. It’s not just about one specific target. It’s about undermining technologies that affect us all.

TravelSafer, Campus Safety

sgupta — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:47:21 +0000

TravelSafer, Campus Safety sgupta Thu, 01/07/2016 - 15:47

URL

https://www.campussafety.utoronto.ca/travel-safer

Walk Safe and Work Alone Programs

sgupta — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:47:21 +0000

Walk Safe and Work Alone Programs sgupta Thu, 01/07/2016 - 15:47

URL

https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/campus-police/walk-safe-and-work-alone-programs

Toward the quantum Internet: Amr Helmy and the Connaught Global Challenge Award

sgupta — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 16:56:03 +0000

Toward the quantum Internet: Amr Helmy and the Connaught Global Challenge Award sgupta Thu, 01/07/2016 - 11:56

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Professor Amr Helmy received a Connaught Global Challenge award to research quantum computing and digital security

Marit Mitchell

Author legacy

Marit Mitchell

Topic

Breaking Research

Our Faculty & Staff

Security

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Connaught

Research

Subheadline

“My personal vision is for a quantum Internet that can go beyond quantum-based security”

After terror attacks last year in Europe and Africa, speculation swirled that the plotters may have been using smartphone apps to encrypt their communications.

Now, Professor Amr Helmy of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering is leading research that could break open such encryption while ensuring the security, privacy and confidentiality of legitimate communications.

Helmy's work is supported by a Connaught Global Challenge Award. The award, funded by U of T’s Connaught Fund, was established in 2011 to support interdisciplinary approaches to problems of global significance. Proposals come from the U of T research community, involve large teams from multiple disciplines and are subjected to the highest level of international peer review.

Paris, Beirut and ISIS: Aisha Ahmad on the terror attacks and the aftermath

sgupta — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 14:39:05 +0000

Paris, Beirut and ISIS: Aisha Ahmad on the terror attacks and the aftermath sgupta Tue, 11/17/2015 - 09:39

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On Nov. 14, London's Trafalgar Square hosted a vigil for victims of the Paris attacks (photo by Garry Knight via Flickr)

Jelena Damjanovic

Author legacy

Jelena Damjanovic

Topic

Global Lens

Why is the niqab an election issue? Q & A with Professor Aisha Ahmad

sgupta — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 10:11:30 +0000

Why is the niqab an election issue? Q & A with Professor Aisha Ahmad sgupta Thu, 10/08/2015 - 06:11

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The government has no business in the wardrobes of Canadians," says Ahmad

Jelena Damjanovic

Author legacy

Jelena Damjanovic

Topic

Subheadline

"...My wardrobe has fallen under increased scrutiny, as part of a toxic discourse that is pitting Canadians against their own neighbours," says Ahmad.

Quebec is the the only province requiring Muslim women who wear a niqab to unveil their faces when delivering public services as employees of the government, or receiving them as citizens.

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper has increasingly been voicing his support for the law outside of Quebec – sparking heated debates in the public discourse and gaining ground as an election issue.

U of T News spoke to Aisha Ahmad about the significance of the niqab for Muslim women and her thoughts on the proposed law.

Ahmad is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, specializing in international security. She has conducted extensive field research on Islamic extremist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia.

What is a niqab?

The niqab is a veil that some Muslim women choose to wear that covers their nose and mouth. The majority of Muslim women do not wear a veil, but some make this choice out of religious conviction. Much more common among Muslim women is the hijab, which is a headscarf that covers the hair, but not the face.

As a security specialist who works on political conflict in the Muslim world, I've worn every possible variation of hijab and niqab from East Africa to the Middle East to South Asia. I fancy myself to be a connoisseur of the hijab and its many cultural and stylistic expressions.

As a Canadian Muslim, I also have experience wearing a hijab right here at home. At different points in my life, I have chosen to wear a hijab (and not wear a hijab), as an expression of my own socio-cultural identity. Right now, I choose to wear a hijab when I teach my classes at the university, but I don't wear it when I train at my boxing gym.

Before this election, my daily choice of dress has never been a political issue, and no one other than me has chosen what I wear on any given day. My closet is home to an array of summer dresses, boxing equipment, flower-printed hijabs, and a Team Canada Crosby jersey. All of a sudden, part of my wardrobe has fallen under increased scrutiny, as part of a toxic discourse that is pitting Canadians against their own neighbours.

What do you think about the government’s decision to try to ban face coverings at citizenship ceremonies?

It started with the citizenship ceremonies, but now the Conservatives are looking to exclude Muslim women in other public spaces as well. Harper’s obsession with forcibly removing Muslim women’s clothing has so far succeeded in distracting voters from his abysmal record on the economy and foreign relations.

Realizing they were on the ropes in this election, the Harper-Duceppe strategy has been to stoke up xenophobia over a tiny group of benign women. It has been part of a multi-pronged strategy aimed at targeting minorities who have little power, and are therefore easy prey. The attempted ban of the veil was deemed illegal by a federal judge, but the move did exactly what Harper and Duceppe hoped it would: distract voters from the issues that really matter to them.

From targeting religious attire to calling other cultures “barbaric,” the Harper-Duceppe strategy aims at actively creating social xenophobia and then presenting themselves as protectors against an imagined enemy.

This is an old move from a political playbook that we’ve seen used in places like the former Yugoslavia. And in all cases where this political tactic is used, xenophobic violence typically follows. From Bosnia to Rwanda, the science clearly shows that when political leaders use xenophobic tactics, they have the power to incite violence between neighbours who otherwise had no problems with each other.

The fact that these political strategies are being employed in Canada today, however, is astonishing and unprecedented. It’s a dark change in the political culture of Ottawa.

From a security specialist viewpoint, are there any circumstances when you would support calls for Muslim women to unveil their faces?

All circumstances in which a Muslim woman should be required to unveil for security purposes are already well established in our laws. Muslim women already unveil for identification purposes and screening at airports and government offices, in accordance with the many laws we have in place to ensure public safety. Muslim women who choose to wear a veil have cooperated with these procedures, just as other Canadians have.

Why is Harper focusing on this issue now?

Frankly, the Harper-Duceppe obsession with forcibly removing Muslim women’s clothing reeks of desperation and failure. But political leaders are by definition in positions of leadership and trust. Putting any vulnerable populations at risk in a desperate attempt to hold onto power should ostensibly disqualify a person from office.

The government has no business in the wardrobes of Canadians. It is time for those political frontrunners who are focused on the issues to be given the opportunity to lead, and refocus the public discourse on Canada’s real values of freedom, inclusivity, and respect.

picpath

sites/default/files/2015-10-08-aisha-ahmad.jpg

Attacking the energy grid: cyber secrets worth stealing inside your home

sgupta — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 09:06:39 +0000

Attacking the energy grid: cyber secrets worth stealing inside your home sgupta Thu, 07/03/2014 - 05:06

Cutline

A technician reads a home electricity meter (photo by Ildar Sagdejev via Wikimedia Commons)

Marit Mitchell

Author legacy

Marit Mitchell

Topic

Breaking Research

Security

With U.S. airstrike in Syria, potential for conflict with Russia is “immense,” says U of T political scientist

Trudeau meets Trump: U of T experts on what's at stake for Canada

Read more of the CBC interview

Watching the watchers: U of T’s Ron Deibert blazing new trails with the Citizen Lab

Read Deibert talking about China

Citizen Lab experts say latest hacking highlights security, regulation vulnerabilities

Read about the report here

Read the full report here

John Scott-Railton

Follow Scott-Railton’s digital security advice

Sarah McKune

TravelSafer, Campus Safety

Tags

Walk Safe and Work Alone Programs

Tags

Toward the quantum Internet: Amr Helmy and the Connaught Global Challenge Award

Read more about projects backed by the Connaught Global Challenge Award

Paris, Beirut and ISIS: Aisha Ahmad on the terror attacks and the aftermath

Why is the niqab an election issue? Q & A with Professor Aisha Ahmad

Attacking the energy grid: cyber secrets worth stealing inside your home