How surveillance, trolls, and fear of arrest affect Egypt’s journalists

As Egypt’s crackdown on the press extends to social media and other communication platforms, many journalists say phishing attempts, trolling, software to monitor social media posts, and a draft law that would require registration for social media users are making them think twice before covering sensitive issues.

The issue of targeting journalists online was brought into focus by the NilePhishscam that has targeted more than 110 journalists and activists since 2016–many of them implicated in a large-scale legal case Egypt brought against non-governmental organizations–according to a joint report published by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a local human rights groups also targeted in the scam.

Through “reverse engineering,” which uses information about the victim to predict their behavior, NilePhish attackers used fake Dropbox and Google Documents invitations to trick victims into entering their account information so hackers could access their communications, according to the report.