Scott-Railton quoted on Bloomberg on pro-regime hackers' malware in Libya and Syria
“We’re moving to a new place with surveillance,” says John Scott-Railton, a doctoral student at the University of California Los Angeles’ Luskin School of Public Affairs who has helped track Trojans in Libya and Syria, where he says pro- regime hackers cobbled together malware attacks from free or inexpensive products available online. He also coordinated research for this study, passing the first malware samples from Bloomberg to Marquis-Boire.
The Bahraini case is a breakthrough because it shows the use of a more sophisticated, invasive hacking tool available for purchase by nations that might not be able to develop their own cyber weapons, Scott-Railton says. “The time for active penetration by states at a widely deployable scale has come,” he says.
