COMMUNITY PROJECT Civil Society Cyber Shield
Citizen groups tend to engage in sensitive issues and thus become the target of cyber attack. But at the same time, they usually lack the resources to defend themselves. In this case, their work can be threatened by network monitoring, cyber attack, network blockade, network interruption, and Internet censorship. Taiwan has always been famous for its active information security community and civil society. Therefore, Civil Society Cyber Shield hopes to combine these two specialties of Taiwan and serve as the connection between technology experts and citizens. By connecting these two groups of people, we can improve the information security of citizen groups.
Introduction
Introduction
Taiwan has internationally-acclaimed open source community and active civil society. To connect these two groups, international affairs section of OCF, New School of Democracy, HITCON, and Taiwan Association for Human Rights developed a project named Civil Society Cyber Shield (CSCS) to help social activists reach the latest information security tools, fight against cyber threats, and promote social issues in a safe online environment.
Besides, Taiwan is one of the few highly democratic countries in Asia, so we hope we can foster an international information security support network to provide high-quality training courses for social activists and other high-risk communities in Asia.
In 2017, we hosted an information security and privacy protection workshop for human rights activists in East Asia. 50 participants and various international organizations from over 14 different countries were invited to Taiwan, which facilitates collaborations and training courses in many Southeast Asian countries.
In 2018, we started a training project for those who would like to become information security trainers. Through this project, we hope to nurture information security talents, bridge the communication between citizen groups and IT communities, and foster more international collaborations. We have invited many experts from both Taiwan’s citizen groups and IT communities to join our projects, and we will keep promoting our in-house training and international training projects.
In 2020, we provided digital security service to 12 human rights civil society organizations, and held the Digital Security Workshop for Civil Society Organization during the East Asia Democracy Forum. The Workshop aimed to equip human rights advocates in Taiwan with basic knowledge on digital security and how to protect themself from digital attacks. Moreover, through the collaboration of all CSCS community members, a set of digital security training materials in Chinese have been developed. The CSCS community hopes this set of training materials can really meet the needs of local CSOs.
Our mission
CSCS’ set of digital security training materials includes:
→Training materials for trainers (translated from Security Education Companion)
As EFF’s website stated “SEC (Security Education Companion), launched by Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a richful resource for people who would like to help their communities learn about digital security but are new to the art of security training. Lesson modules include passwords and password managers, VPN, Phishing, end-to-end encrypted communications...and so on, along with handouts, worksheets.” Visit EFF’s resourceful SEC site!
→Digital security training material developed by CSCS community (in Chinese)
This training material is developed based upon the needs of CSOs in Taiwan. This material aims to translate knowledge on digital security that is often written in technical terms into resources that are easy to understand. Also, it collects teaching resources that CSCS trainers have used and received positive feedback from CSOs, and movie clips introducing self-protection tips.
Should you want to learn more about the CSCS, please click
→2018 Work Report (in Chinese)
→2019 Work Report (in Chinese)
→2020 Work Report (in Chinese)