Community Updates

The following are community updates from the weekly Glitter Meetup. They do not have names associated with them. However, if you interested in a specific item and connecting to the people(s) associated with the work, email [email protected] and we can facilitate an intro if the people(s) consent to it.

August 23

• Someone is trying to apply SAFETAG for LGBTQ communities in South Asia.
• Totem project is an online platform helping journalists and activists use digital security & privacy tools and tactics more effectively in their work by Greenhost and FreePressUnlimited. https://totem-project.org/
• Malaysian Parliament passes bill to repeal Anti-Fake News Act last week
• IFF Fellowship deadline has been extended to August 27.
• In Zimbabwe, there was a constitutional court hearing yesterday for the just ended elections where the opposition party is challenging the results that were announced. Judgement will be announced tomorrow at 1400hrs UTC+2
• Someone is working on a due process (appeals) campaign targeting social media platforms (primarily Facebook) and would love to chat off-list with anyone interested or working on similar things.
• The Tor meeting will be happening in Mexico end of September.

About Safetag:

• SAFETAG is an assessment framework to work with organizations and help them build informed decisions about the risks they face. It provides a wide variety of different activities: some very research focused, like understanding the context the organization is working within -- each organization has a totally different set of risks depending on their context; Some are very technical, such as scanning office networks to understand what systems and traffic are on the network; and many are "interpersonal" -- simply talking to staff members, interviewing management, and running exercises to help the organization build a cohesive and shared understanding of their risks and which of them they accept, and which they want to prioritize to mitigate.

• In the best case, you should have a few people helping out -- one person who has a more digisec training background, and another who's happier sitting in the back room hacking around on things. Often funding and scheduling mean that one person has to do all three, so careful planning and preparation are important -- you do NOT want to be researching how to nmap an organization without crashing their computers in the middle of an assessment. In addition, there is value and more impact if the audit is done by more people with different skills other than a single person.

• SAFETAG scoping questions are really good to help people understand their risks.

• Some folks have it customized for working with LGTBQ in West Africa.

• SAFETAG wants to be community owned, but depends on people taking ownership/participating.

• Even though someone might be from a different parts of the world, so many common problems come up that are similar. So you may think your approach only applies to some super specific situation, but almost guaranteed someone else is facing the same problem

• Best tips, for network scanning - (a) be careful and (b) keep it balanced. A lot of the tools, even "simple" nmap, have a lot of super dangerous options, and you really never know if a computer is going to be vulnerable to a 10-year-old bug. Start super lightweight, and super low-impact, even flooding a system that may be a few years out of date can cause it to fail, and then you're suddenly halfway through an audit and have to stop to fix something you broke. Look at software versions, and peek via nmap on weird ports being open before doing anything more intense

• The other big tip is to not get trapped in any one approach. People with hacking/pentesting backgrounds tend to ignore the interactive parts, and people with training backgrounds tend to shy away from the technical pieces. It takes both, plus a solid base of research, to really understand an organization. Also, and super important, you can also spend a LOT of time digging in to some really obscure tech things, and lose the opportunity to ensure you have a holistic view of the org.

• The SAFETAG translation in Spanish is out of date. Ping them if you can help identify chunks to prioritize for funding.

• Re: network scanning, a super fun thing to do (but requires a system with a decent chunk of RAM and a few hours of access to a lot of bandwidth) is to download some vm images. vulnhub is a good repository, and MS has some testing images for old versions of windows (see the safetag reference file here for links: https://github.com/SAFETAG/SAFETAG/blob/master/en/references/network_env.adids.md). Use virtualbox to run them locally and have them all on your local network, and then you can use nmap and such locally (do this at home, you can even have it set up to truly be a "fake" network on your computer only -- do NOT do it on a shared or work network!!) This is a great way to get started exploring and using different scanning options

'August 16

• New org in latin america in the works ( Con-nexo). They will be developing projects on capacity building on security, research, security support to organizations, tool development and community generation around communities at risk and security in general.
• Lots of love happening for SAFETAG fellowship
• Zimbabwe still doesnt' have a president even after voting
• Found out Digital Society of Zimbabwe was born in the IFF :)
• Folks working on security investigation framework in tails. Prototype coming soon! Github here: https://gitlab.com/scif/whiskers
• Blog posts coming out taimed at helping new auditors get in the SAFETAG mindset; as it can be very overwhelming to try and tackle the guide as it exists now
• Someone who did research on digital censorship in post-soviet states and how each country's approach differs (about a third have very free internet and about a third have internet censorship in place), is currently talking to a publisher about turning it into a book on the history of censorship in the region.
• Someone is cultivating digital security trainers to assist HRDs in Southeast Asia as many trainers are still flown in.
• Past DIF Folks asking that a community is created so they can further connect.
• Various games made by people in the community such as BLOOG: how formal and informal groups interact in crisis. we called it ENCAPE http://blog.bl00cyb.org/2017/08/interfaces-between-formal-and-informal-crisis-response/, Malicious Content, the infosec card game like Cards against humanit, and the depressing, Cards against Humanitarians" -- now JadedAid -- http://jadedaid.com/).
• First alpha version Tor Browser coming out soon!
• Maybe a hackathon with artist, process oriented.