Ethiopian dissidents living in the United States and other countries were repeatedly targeted by a militarized spyware campaign, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab reported Wednesday.
Those activists appear to have hit by PC 360, a spyware designed by the Israeli firm Cyberbit that is sold only to governments.
The government of Ethiopia is believed to have targeted Ethiopian journalists working in foreign countries in the past with a different brand of commercially available spyware.
Targets of the PC 360 attacks included activists and other supporters of the Oromos, a regionalized ethnic group clashing with Ethiopia’s Somali population. One was the director of the Oromos News Network (ONN) website, Jawar Mohammed, who lived in Minneapolis. Another was Henok Gabisa, a visiting academic at Washington and Lee University in Virginia who founded the Association of Oromo Public Defenders.
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