Our Services
The Digital Security Helpline is a free of charge resource for civil society around the world. We offer real-time, direct technical assistance and advice to activists, independent media, and civil society organizations, including:
- Rapid response on digital security incidents
- Personalized recommendations, instruction, and follow-up support on digital security issues
- Help assessing risks and creating organizational or community security strategies
- Guidance on security practices and tools for organizations, communities, groups, and individuals
- Support for securing technical infrastructure, websites, and social media against attacks
- Referrals, capacity-building, in-person consultations, and training
- Education materials in multiple languages
The Helpline Team
The Digital Security Helpline is operated by a global team who are:
- 24/7: Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
- Nimble: Responsive to incidents in a rapid, efficient, and uniform manner
- Multilingual: Fluent in English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Filipino
Contact us at: [email protected]. If you have email encryption, you can download our GPG public key.
Learning About Digital Security
Access works with individuals and organizations around the world to improve their knowledge about good security practices. Our tools, guides, reports, and papers can help increase awareness about threats, assess existing practices, build capacity, and support users. These include reports and papers about critical threats, trends, and suggested policy solutions.
Guides
Access creates guides and materials to help communities, organizations, and individuals improve their digital security. These guides target a spectrum of users, from non-technical users to website administrators. Please find some of our guides below:
- Windows and Mac email encryption guides: helps you set up encrypted email.
- Defending Against Denial of Service (also in Arabic, Persian, and Russian): helps system administrators diagnose and mitigate denial of service attacks.
- Digital First Aid Kit: helps you in emergency situations, such as when your social media account gets hacked, your website is compromised, or your computer is infected.
Our partner organizations have produced a number of guides and resources that we find valuable in our work, and you may too. They include:
- Security in a Box, from Frontline Defenders and the Tactical Technology Collective.
- Encryption Works, from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
- Surveillance Self-Defense, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Publications
Access provides reporting and analysis of the latest threats to civil society organizations, citizen media, and at-risk individuals. By building awareness and sharing information, we aim to help individuals and organizations prepare for and defend themselves against digital security threats. Our reports and discussion papers include:
- The “Global Civil Society at Risk” report series, including An Overview of Some of the Major Cyber Threats Facing Civil Society, and One of These Things Is Not Like the Other: A Report on Fake Domain Attacks
- Security reports on SSL Man-in-the-Middle attacks in English and Arabic
- The Weakest Link in the Chain: Vulnerabilities in the SSL Certificate Authority System and What Should Be Done About Them
- Commonwealth of Surveillance States: On the Export and Resale of Russian Surveillance Technology to Post-Soviet Central Asia