Dan Kaminsky Fellowship Diversifies Support for Human Rights Security Research
The Human Security Dan Kaminsky Fellowship has added a new area of security research this year that aims to translate threat intelligence best practices to human rights and civil liberties. The fellowship supports Dr. Gillian “Gus” Andrews with financial and data resources to start formalizing ways to track coordinated harassment, stalking, and disinformation campaigns against activists, journalists, human rights workers and non-governmental (NGO) employees to protect their lives and liberty.
About the Fellowship
The fellowship was founded to scale the way security researchers report and automate open source vulnerability fixes. Human Security gave Jonathan Leitschuh funding and resources in 2022 to research ways to automate and scale fixes in open source software.
About the Fellow
Dr. Gus Andrews is a digital literacy expert with roots in both human rights advocacy communities and the cybersecurity world. She teaches graduate-level courses at Columbia University’s Teachers College on technology and culture, technology and literacy, anthropology, and education, and explores user behaviors to create better user experiences. She was involved in the Independent Media Center (Indymedia) movement and founded the New York City Indymedia. Andrews is known for her work with the DISARM Foundation to build a threat intelligence framework to track disinformation campaigns like the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Discussion
The fellowship has two goals: to support the community’s ability to gather, analyze, and use digital threat intelligence and compare indicators of compromise between disinformation campaigns and traditional cyber threats. Andrews aims to identify links between traditional cybersecurity threat actors and the ones harassing and attacking human rights workers and other activists. The fellowship provides resources for Andrews to research and formalize sharing threat intelligence information.
Andrews thinks that her research into how coordinated harassment works on shadowy forces and online communities, particularly by identifying command and control and indicators of those harassing them, will help people who are being attacked.
Andrews observes that the digital security space has built trust among NGOs despite the lack of formal channels for threat intelligence information gathering. Sharing this information represents a significant upskilling challenge for the human rights community. While some threat labs in South America have tools to help journalists identify disinformation, people in many riskier areas rely on one device.
Advice
Research into digital threat intelligence information gathering can be complex and requires a large pool of experts to make it effective. Providing support for these groups is incredibly important, especially for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that can have limited resources and manpower. Governments and private entities should continue to support efforts to share threat intelligence to help protect human rights workers, activists, and journalists who are at risk of being attacked.
<< photo by Markus Spiske >>
