Hello KICTANet.
The Citizen Lab has published the latest of its investigation on surveillance in Ethiopia.
This report describes how Ethiopian dissidents in Kenya, the US, UK, and other countries were targeted with emails containing sophisticated commercial spyware posing as Adobe Flash updates and PDF plugins.
Targets include a US-based Ethiopian diaspora media outlet, the Oromia Media Network (OMN), a PhD student, and a lawyer. During the course of our investigation, one of the authors of this report was also targeted.
From the Ethiopian lead, several other African countries (Rwanda, Zambia, Nigeria etc) have been pinned as using the same product - or at least the company has ongoing demonstrations or tutorials.
Ethiopia experienced massive protests across the country last year, the bulk of which came from the Oromo Community. It is interesting to note how where the Internet shutdowns stopped in the country, surveillance picked up.