Human rights organizations and activists in Egypt have been under the attack of a hacking campaign since November, a Thursday report revealed. The hacking campaign, carried out by a group dubbed Nile Phish, targeted the institutional and personal accounts of employees at eight organizations, including the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, Al-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture and Violence, Nazra for Feminist Studies, and the Egyptian Commission for Personal Rights. The report was a result of a collaborative project between EIPR and Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group at Toronto University. It describes 92 hacking attempts since the campaign began. Almost all of the targets identified are also implicated in Case 173, a “sprawling” legal case brought by the Egyptian government against NGOs, stated Citizen Lab. The case is known as the foreign funding case, and is regarded as an “unprecedented crackdown” on Egypt’s civil society. “The Egyptian security agencies are obviously behind the attack,” Ziad Abdel Tawab, deputy director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, told Motherboard. The…
