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TECH SUPPORT The implications of recent cyber-espionage investigations highlight how insecure data and information Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab. is on the Internet. BY GERRY BLACKWELL The wild, wild web nage network, the story briefly made headlines. Most of us marvelled at the ingenuity and nefariousness of the alleged perpetrator, the Chinese gov- ernment. Some may have momentarily fretted about implications for inter- national security. But the man who helped break the GhostNet story, Ron A few months ago when a Canadian research group exposed the GhostNet, a brazen cyber-espio- Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, says the implications are at once more far- reaching and more immediate — espe- cially, perhaps, for lawyers. What Deibert's team at the Citizen Lab discovered in the course of a 10-month investigation was a network of over 1,200 computers around the world infected with a piece of mal- ware, a Trojan horse called Gh0st RAT, that allows attackers to take complete remote control of an infected computer, undetected by its owner. Gh0st RAT lets a controller extract files from the target computer. Deibert's field team in Dharamsala, India watched in real time as GhostNet controllers extracted docu- ments — letters to foreign heads of state and strategy papers — from the Dalai Lama's personal computer. It can also www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com JULY 2009 27 D.W. DORKEN