In a report published late Tuesday, Citizen Lab said that it had also found a FinFisher sample hiding in a document about Malaysia's upcoming general election.

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On that subject, all the signs are of "tacit support, " says Helmi Noman, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

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Citizen Lab's Morgan Marquis-Boire said the evidence fell short of proving that FinFisher was being used by one government or another, but said its dispersal hinted at the global reach of espionage programs.

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Now, that curtain has risen slightly: Users can again send e-mail and access the Web, according to Ron Deibert, director at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab and an investigator at the OpenNet Initiative.

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The work undertaken at the lab would be citizen-led, Mr Rattner told the BBC, and was likely to include crowdsourcing data.

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