There has been significant discussion regarding the impact of the internet, social media, and smart phones on the uprisings in the Middle East. Accompanying the digitisation of dissent and the growth of an increasingly connected online community has been the rise in malware targeting activists in the region.
From backdoored anti-censorship software to malicious PDFs promising details on revolutionary high councils, this talk will detail specific examples and provide analysis of malware which has been seen to target dissidents in Libya, Syria and other countries over the past 18 months. The distribution of these attacks across forums specialising in regional issues, social media and spear phishing will also be discussed.
Morgan Marquis-Boire is a Security Engineer at Google on the Incident Response Team. He acts as a Technical Adviser at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and was one of the original organizers of the KiwiCON conference in New Zealand. In addition to talking about himself in the 3rd person and presenting at security conferences, he has spent time moon-lighting in such diverse fields as environmentalism and academia.