Blog

Canada’s refusal to bid for the Internet Governance Forum 2024: a missed opportunity for the country and global civil society

By: dmitri On: October 11, 2023 , Comments Disabled
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) plays a vital role in shaping the future of the internet, fostering international cooperation, and addressing the various challenges that arise in the digital age. In recent months, many Canadians organizations were having high hopes of hosting the IGF in Montreal in 2024. Led by eQualitie, envisioning it as a […]
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Ukraine Deserves to Win. Nobel Peace Prize Laureates To Send a Powerful Message to the US Government

By: dmitri On: July 22, 2023 , , Comments Disabled
From July 25 to 28, 2023, a delegation of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureates from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia will hold meetings with senior US government officials, delivering a message of unwavering support for Ukraine. The visit, initiated and supported by eQualitie will take place in Washington DC in partnership with the National Endowment […]
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A year in review: eQualitie’s reactions to the war in Ukraine

By: dmitri On: January 02, 2023 , Comments Disabled
A year in review: eQualitie’s reactions to the war in Ukraine

A year in review: eQualitie’s reactions to the war in Ukraine

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Since the beginning of the second invasion in February 2022, eQualitie has launched a series of rapid efforts focusing on digital security capacity building and urgent response to various communication and safety needs of Ukrainian citizens, media agencies, human rights organizations, and CSOs. A lot of the focus of our existing programming on web security […]
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Keeping Ukrainians online during electricity outages

By: dmitri On: December 26, 2022 , , Comments Disabled
Keeping Ukrainians online during electricity outages

Keeping Ukrainians online during electricity outages

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A cargo weighing 6,600 kg as humanitarian aid arrived in Ukraine from Poland, where eQualitie purchased a series of  batteries donated for Ukrainian ISPs. Each battery weighing 38 kg will be installed on the fibre optic and distribution networks of local Internet providers, allowing them to power their networks for an additional 10-12 hours through the electricity outages. This batch of donations has a total capacity of 20,640 Amps or 247 kWh. - helping more Ukrainians access the Internet without interruption. 
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Launching the Ukrainian digital security helpline – Nadiyno

By: dmitri On: November 03, 2022 , , Comments Disabled
On 8th of November 2022, eQualitie and Internews Ukraine are launching nadiyno.org – the first national digital security helpline in Ukraine, for responding to any and all questions from the public relating to cyber security. We have assembled and trained a dedicated team of helpline support staff and digital experts, stood up systems to document […]
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eQualitie launches CENO, world’s first decentralized p2p mobile browser

By: dmitri On: May 10, 2022 , , , , , Comments Disabled
eQualitie launches CENO, world’s first decentralized p2p mobile browser

eQualitie launches CENO, world’s first decentralized p2p mobile browser

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CENO Browser lets anyone access and share information in areas with censored communications Montreal, May 10, 2022 – eQualitie, developer of open-source and reusable digital security systems, is pleased to announce the public launch of its newest democratization tool, CENO Browser. Short for censorship.no, CENO is the world’s first mobile browser that is built specifically […]
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Web Security Fellowship – project review

By: dmitri On: January 08, 2020 Comments Disabled
Launched in early 2019, the Web Security Fellowship was a pilot project for eQualitie to introduce more IT professionals to the ranks of active civil society organizations. Eight fellows were selected from a public application process for a six-month placement within host organizations, comprising of human rights and independent media groups in Russia. The fellowship […]
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Distributed Denial of Women – a general strike

By: Floriana On: February 13, 2017 , , Comments Disabled
It’s a well-known problem: the tech industry, be it proprietary or open source, hasn’t managed to tackle inequality in its ranks despite several proactive efforts and millions of dollars invested to diversify their staff. There are many explanations and critiques of these approaches, but in the end what counts is that technology is still developed […]
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Who bytes your bits? – digital security training in Toronto

By: Floriana On: February 08, 2017 Comments Disabled
On the 9th February eQualit.ie’s director Dmitri Vitaliev will lead a digital security training for high-risk journalism hosted by journalist Susana Ferreira as part of #OffAssignment Toronto, a series of workshops and talks for freelance journalists and independent media-makers in Toronto, and organized with the support of CJFE at the DAIS Tkaronto Gallery in Toronto […]
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Deflect in 2016 – an overview

By: Floriana On: January 18, 2017 Comments Disabled
In 2016, Deflect set some records and helped defend online voices against some record breaking attacks. Throughout the year, Deflect served a bit less than 2% of the population connected to the Internet in 2016, published 3 DDoS analytic reports, mitigated the strongest DDoS attack that ever targeted our network, renewed its funding and began […]
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Deflect Stats December 2016

By: Floriana On: January 10, 2017 , Comments Disabled
In December 2016 the Deflect network recorded a slight increase in the number of total hits as compared to the previous month, with a comparable number of unique visitors and banning events. Overall, our edges served 635.4 million pages to 9.6 million unique visitors and banned 36,681 bots.   The following pie charts offer some […]
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Deflect Stats November 2016

By: Floriana On: December 13, 2016 , , Comments Disabled
In November the Deflect network served pages to many legitimate visitors interested in breaking news reported by deflected websites, and mitigated automatically some intense attacks. During the month, Deflect served 585 million pages to 9.8 million visitors, with a slight increase of unique IPs as compared to our October statistics, suggesting a rise in the […]
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Deflect Stats October 2016

By: Floriana On: November 14, 2016 , Comments Disabled
In October Deflect’s metrics kept following the trend we had seen in September, with comparable figures in terms of unique visitors (9.3 million) and a slight increase in total hits (632.8 million requests reaching our edge servers), but with almost twice as many bots identified and banned by Deflect’s banning system – 50,323 bots against […]
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Deflect Stats September 2016

By: Floriana On: October 13, 2016 , Comments Disabled
In September, Deflect metrics grew as new websites joined the service and a popular Syrian website rejoined Deflect to ensure an uninterrupted news stream on the regional conflict. In other news, the Internet witnessed the largest ever DDoS attacks, surpassing 600gbps and then 1 terabyte of traffic per second. These events followed the leaks of […]
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Deflect Stats August 2016

By: Floriana On: September 12, 2016 , Comments Disabled
“No news is good news” in the DDoS mitigation game, and this is what we were hoping for in August 2016. We decided to capitalize on this opportunity and focus the team on new developments supporting free Let’s Encrypt certificates for all Deflect clients, as part of the TLS/HTTPS system. Then, on the 29th everything […]
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Deflecting cyber attacks against the Black Lives Matter website

By: Floriana On: July 12, 2016 , , Comments Disabled
Last week and throughout the weekend, Deflect helped mitigate several DDoS attack bursts against the official Black Lives Matter website. At current estimates over 12,000 bots pounded the website just over 35 million times in 24 hours. An unusual trait of this attack was the prevalence of  malicious connections originating from the US. An in-depth […]
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Deflect Stats June 2016

By: Floriana On: July 01, 2016 , Comments Disabled
If any conclusion can be drawn in comparing this month’s statistics with the rest of the year, it’s probably that hot weather is also discouraging to those bot controllers launching DDoS attacks! The month was rather uneventful on the malicious side of things, but the team worked in earnest to improve our mitigation mechanisms, including threat […]
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Deflect Stats May 2016

By: Floriana On: June 07, 2016 , Comments Disabled
May 2016 was an interesting month for Deflect. We began the month with two intense attacks that required our team’s intervention right in the middle of May Day. After this, the month unrolled with a series of smaller attacks against the same websites, which were by then automatically mitigated by the Deflect network without requiring […]
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Deflect Labs Report #2

By: dmitri On: June 02, 2016 , , Comments Disabled
Botnet attack analysis of Deflect protected website bdsmovement.net This report covers attacks between February 1st and March 31st of six discovered incidents targeting the bdsmovement.net website, including methods of attack, identified botnets and their characteristics. It provides detailed technical information and analysis of trends with the introduction of the Bothound library for attack fingerprinting and […]
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Deflect Stats April 2016

By: dmitri On: May 05, 2016 , , Comments Disabled
April 2016 was noticeable for the amount of attacks launched against Deflect protected websites. Most of them were using the WordPress Pingback reflective attack method. Ukrainian readers topped our statistics this month, with readers from the United States, Ecuador and Russia also generating several million daily hits.       An interesting set of data […]
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Deflect Labs Report #1

By: Floriana On: March 29, 2016 , , , Comments Disabled
Botnet attack analysis covering reporting period February 1 – 29 2016 Deflect protected website – kotsubynske.com.ua This report covers attacks against the Kotsubynske independent media news site in Ukraine, in particular during the first two weeks of February 2016. It details the various methods used to bring down the website via distributed denial of service […]
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TA3M MARCH ’16 “WHO BYTES YOUR BITS”

By: dmitri On: March 14, 2016 , Comments Disabled
We’re all familiar with the idea of a search warrant — but how else can the government access your private information in Canada? This informal TA3M workshop will explore this question—whether in the context of a criminal investigation or otherwise. We’ll also discuss the implications for businesses and organizations that hold private data for their […]
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Activists can run independent and secure online services with Caisleán

By: KheOps On: January 03, 2016 , Comments Disabled
Small non-profit organizations, civil rights groups and activist clusters use online tools to work collaboratively. Unfortunately, too many rely on centralized platforms that are actively exploiting private data lucratively. It is crucial for these organizations to switch to self-hosted solutions to keep control of their data and protect users. A system administrator then has to […]
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Moving Your Site to HTTPS

By: dmitri On: November 26, 2014 , , , Comments Disabled
HTTPS (adding an S for “secure” to HTTP) is an internet communication protocol that protects your users’ connections to your website. Data sent using HTTPS is secured in that HTTPS provides 3 layers of protection: Encryption: while the user is browsing a website, nobody can see their conversations, track their activities in the website, or […]
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