Civil society organizations have always been at the forefront of humanitarian relief efforts, as well as safeguarding civil and human rights. These organizations play a large role in delivering services during crises, whether it is fighting climate change, support during natural disasters, providing health services to marginalized communities and more.
What do many of these organizations have in common? Many times, it’s cyber attacks from adversaries looking to steal sensitive information or disrupt their operations. Cloudflare has seen this firsthand when providing free cybersecurity services to vulnerable groups through programs like Project Galileo, and found that in aggregate, organizations protected under the project experience an average of 95 million attacks per day. While cyber attacks are a problem across all industries in the digital age, civil society organizations are disproportionately targeted, many times due to their advocacy, and because attackers know that they typically operate with limited resources. In most cases, these organizations don’t even know they have been attacked until it is too late.
Over the last 10 years of Project Galileo, we’ve had the opportunity to work more closely with leading civil society organizations. This has led to a number of exciting new partnerships, including our work with the CyberPeace Institute. That’s why we’re excited to share work on a new resource, the CyberPeace Tracer. This resource will enable researchers, civil society, governments, and other organizations to understand threats and data-driven insights about the cyber threat landscape of the vulnerable communities we serve.
Partnership with CyberPeace Institute
The CyberPeace Institute is an independent non-profit based in Switzerland, dedicated to making cyberspace safer and more equitable for everyone. The Institute works closely with partners to minimize the impact of cyberattacks on people’s lives worldwide. In addition to partnerships, the organization provides independent data-driven insights on the threat landscape, from the global healthcare system to cyber attacks during the Russian government's invasion of Ukraine. By analyzing these attacks, they are able to highlight real-world consequences, expose violations of international laws and norms, and promote responsible behavior online.
Cloudflare's work with the CyberPeace Institute started in 2022 when the organization joined Project Galileo.Through the program, Cloudflare was proud not only to help protect the CyberPeace website, but also provide Zero Trust tools that secure access to internal applications for the institute's global workforce. In addition to participating in Project Galileo, CyberPeace has also joined as an official partner, alongside more than 53 civil society organizations that help us identify organizations in need of protection.
As the CyberPeace Institute helped us grow Project Galileo, they also tested out new features including Cloudflare Email Security, a Cloudflare product designed to help protect against phishing and ransomware attacks. Testing the product for their organizations, they found that our approach to proactively detect and block malicious email, and ease of deployment with no need for hardware or extra software, would benefit the wider community they serve. With this in mind, CyberPeace came to us with an idea: they saw the potential to extend Email Security to smaller organizations that don’t have the same technical tools or budget to protect themselves.
Through our unique partnership, the CyberPeace Institute onboards its network of NGOs with Cloudflare Email Security, serving as a central hub to aggregate real-time data on email threats. This information powers a live dashboard, providing other organizations with visibility into phishing campaigns that could impact the broader community. One key challenge in tracking targeted phishing attacks is that many incidents go unreported, or victims may not realize they have been compromised until much later. By having a partner serve as a centralized point of contact, it helps ensure that insights into phishing attempts at one NGO can help protect others before the attack spreads.
The CyberPeace Tracer shares vulnerabilities and threats faced by the community of NGOs, developed by the CyberPeace Institute. The CyberPeace Tracer gathers and analyzes data on cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns targeting NGOs, non-profits, and charities that address global societal challenges. The goal is to better understand the scale and impact of these threats to inform the public, so that organizations can become aware of emerging threats and take action to improve their defenses.
For the Tracer, CyberPeace partners and collects data directly from partners who monitor a predefined set of NGO domains. The dashboards detail publicly disclosed software and hardware vulnerabilities that can be exploited against monitor NGOs, malware infections detected, and analysis of phishing attacks that reveal trends and attacker tactics. The Tracer breaks out incidents by sector, including organizations working in health, development, food, water, energy, human rights, women’s rights and more. On the phishing dashboard, users can filter by country, identify the top phishing subject lines that NGOs received, as well as the top five threats that were blocked by the Email Security product.
Our collaboration with CyberPeace strengthens defenses against phishing by allowing the CyberPeace Institute to analyze flagged emails, helping to identify and disrupt malicious domains and ongoing threats. By analyzing past incidents, we have found that organizations can learn from others’ experiences and implement best practices to reduce the likelihood of future attacks and data breaches, especially in a sector where many times, attacks go unreported.
Strengthening cyber security resources for vulnerable communities
This is an exciting development for strengthening reporting on cyber attacks to non-profits, enabling them to collaborate on solutions, share threat intelligence, and build stronger defenses across the sector. We encourage NGOs who are interested in onboarding to Cloudflare Email Security through the CyberPeace Institute to visit cyberpeaceinstitute.org/cloudflare-area-1/. If you are looking for protection under Project Galileo, apply at cloudflare.com/galileo/.