The Tech Lab

The Tech Lab for Global South is our platform for sharing and building knowledge, and engaging in cross-regional learnings about  protocols, tools and frameworks that we use to strengthen the digital resilience of our institutions and communities. On one hand, the complexity of the digital threats ecosystem and surveillance markets is growing. On the other hand, organizations running help desks, mobile forensic services, and supporting the digital security of the social justice systems are on the rise. This reality presents a powerful opportunity for collaboration among talented technologists and researchers from the Global South to together understand, analyse, and be better able to address trends and connections in the digital threats ecosystem across different geographies. 

Under the Tech Lab we aim to  produce and share knowledge in the main areas of threat intelligence, mobile forensics, and risk assessment frameworks. We also aim to design and intersect our technical research to support social justice communities, and entities working on litigation and advocacy in the digital resilience ecosystem. 

DRN Members will be collaborating on the collection, organization and analysis, within secure channels of communications, of the different types of threats that they encounter. Members will have different layers of engagement in this project, starting with sharing information about emerging threats and various levels of support.

This project will be seeding multiple other initiatives with the resources and information needed to develop further analysis, support, advocacy, responses, and planning. 

Developing technical capacities for proper collection, analysis, management and response to the different aspects of digital forensics is needed in order to comprehensively understand the mechanisms of attacks that our territories face, and being able to properly respond.

Members who run forensic labs identified not only the need of developing these technical capacities but also focus on setting up proper methodologies of knowledge sharing on triaging, data collection, and defining clear processes of chain of custody to provide higher data security and more efficient support to victims.

Through a secure knowledge sharing collaboration platform the experiences, knowledge and capacities can be documented and shared. Constant communication and collaboration will be fundamental to the continued development of these capacities.

Understanding the different organizational and territorial contexts in which DRN members are working, allows us to be able to correctly evaluate the tools and frameworks we use to appropriately approach the mitigation and prevention of security risks. 

The information collected and shared in the threat intelligence and mobile forensics workstreams would be used to prioritize which threats the Network should focus on based on likelihood and impact, and will allow members to create proper tools for their territories for assessment, evaluation of solutions, and implementation of mitigation strategies.