🛡️ The Defender · stay secure
Defend your devices, your accounts and the people you are responsible for.
$250 a month opens every class on this track — recorded, with its written curriculum and the standups every week, so there is somewhere to bring the thing on your screen that does not look right. $500 adds the room itself. They work outward from the router in your house to the stranger on the phone who sounds exactly like your bank, and you finish each one having done the thing on your own hardware.
Next in the room: Home Network Defense · Wednesday 30 September
Out from the middle is how far it reaches. Around the dial is when it runs, clockwise from the next one at the top.
- 01 Home Network Defense — the wire in your own house
- 02 Consumer Device Rescue and Defense — the devices on it
- 03 Scam and Fraud Home Defense — whoever rings you
- 04 Digital Identity Defense — the companies holding your accounts
Start here
Security advice is worthless until it knows who you are hiding from.
Four questions, thirty seconds. You get a short list: which free guide to read tonight, and which class to be in. Your answers stay here: this runs in your browser, and the first step it names is saved in it. Clear answers wipes that too.
Pick an answer above and your short list appears here. If you would rather just read, the five guides are below and every one of them is free.
Free, public, no account
Somebody is typing one of these into a search bar at 2am.
Five situations, five guides. No sign-up, no email capture, no paywall, no account. If one of these is your situation, go and read it now and decide about the classes afterwards.
Digital Security Reset
The full reset, in phases, starting with the ten minutes before you touch anything. Ground yourself, work out what actually happened, cut the access, then clean up in an order that does not destroy the evidence.
Read the reset → Cyberstalked by an ex or a partner?The Story of Six Roses
Written for the case where the person tracking you already knows your passcode, your security questions and your habits. Safety planning first, then breaking their digital access without tipping them off.
Read Six Roses → Activist?Activist Security: Tails OS and Beyond
If your threat model is the state, this is the guide you want. Threat modeling, then Tails as a digital panic room, then the operational discipline that makes it mean anything. This is not an easy path.
Read the activist guide → Journalist?Journalist Digital Security
The threat landscape you are actually in, anti-doxxing and identity protection, and a device architecture that keeps a source's safety from depending on your worst day.
Read the journalist guide → Home for the holidays?Cybersecurity for Grandma
A visit-length checklist for the relative who keeps nearly falling for it. Pull her off the people-finder sites, set up a password manager she will actually use, and agree a family password before you leave.
Read the holiday guide →Read all five. Then come and do it with us.
The guides give you the whole method in writing, and the recordings give you every class that has worked through it. The live room gives you somebody watching your actual screen who can tell you whether what you are looking at is normal.
Join us · $250 Or be in the room · $500The order
Outward from your own house.
Your network, then your hardware, then the people who contact you, then the accounts that live somewhere else. Each one is two hours — in the room or on the recording — and each one ends with something changed on your actual devices rather than something noted down for later.
-
01 Home Network Defense Wed 30 Sep
Find out what is actually on your network, including the things you did not put there, and which account really owns the router.
- follow a device hardening checklist
- locate every device on your own network
- produce a threat model for your own situation
- design a household security posture for people who did not choose it
- reconcile security with what people will actually do
-
02 Consumer Device Rescue and Defense Wed 28 Oct
Take a phone or a laptop that somebody else has had their hands on and make it yours again — checklist first, guesswork never.
- follow a device hardening checklist
- locate a substitute part when the named one is unavailable
- repurpose a retired device into a working server
- migrate your work off a subscription without losing it
- design a household security posture for people who did not choose it
-
03 Scam and Fraud Home Defense Wed 25 Nov
Read a pretext for what it is, and hold a callback rule that survives being rushed by somebody who sounds official.
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- produce a threat model for your own situation
- transform an incoming message into ask deadline and claimed sender
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- design a household security posture for people who did not choose it
- reconcile security with what people will actually do
-
04 Digital Identity Defense Wed 6 Jan
Attack your own account recovery, find where it folds, and rebuild it so that losing the device is not the same as losing the account.
- configure recovery that survives losing the device
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
- verify what can be found about you is actually gone
- design a household security posture for people who did not choose it
- reconcile security with what people will actually do
Why identity defense sits at the end. Falsifying your own account recovery means pretexting yourself: ringing the help desk, answering the security questions, seeing how far a plausible stranger gets. That exercise only tells you the truth once you can already read a pretext, which is what the class before it teaches. Run it the other way round and you will grade your own attack far too kindly.
What $250 a month buys
The whole track, and a room every week.
The devices you already own
A phone, a laptop or the router that is already in your house, and two hours where you can sit with it. No terminal, no command line, nothing to buy and nothing to install before you arrive. If you can read this page, you have the equipment.
The standups, every week
At least one a week and usually several — the place you bring the email that looked wrong, before it costs anybody anything. At $500 a month you also get every class live, and again the next time each comes round: sit the network class once on your own router and once more with the household in the room, for the same price.
Their recordings and their curriculum
The recording of every class on this track, plus the written curriculum behind it — so a Wednesday you could not make is still a Wednesday you get, and you can go back through it as often as you like.
Campus, standups and mutual aid
The Matrix campus, the daily standups, and the school's mutual aid intake — housing, food access, emergency funds, childcare, transportation. A stalking case is usually also a moving-house case.
Done, not noted down for later
- follow a device hardening checklist
- locate every device on your own network
- produce a threat model for your own situation
- design a household security posture for people who did not choose it
- reconcile security with what people will actually do
- locate a substitute part when the named one is unavailable
- repurpose a retired device into a working server
- migrate your work off a subscription without losing it
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- transform an incoming message into ask deadline and claimed sender
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- configure recovery that survives losing the device
- falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
- verify what can be found about you is actually gone
All of it on your own hardware, in the room, while somebody who has seen it go wrong before is watching your screen.
First through the door on new courses
You get priority enrollment when a new Defender course opens. You are in the room the first time it runs, not on the list for the second time.
The five guides, free either way
Public before you pay, public afterwards. Nothing has been held back for a paying version — the reset guide opens with what to do in the next ten minutes, and it opens that way for everybody.
Four doors down the hall
If this is not the one you need, here is the one that is.
You want to own the whole stack, not just defend it
If the motivation is that you are tired of renting your tools — your own server, your own network, your own model on your own hardware — two of these classes are on that route as well, and it keeps going into hardware rather than into opsec. Take Digital Independence →
You are defending a group, not a household
If the people you are responsible for are a mutual aid network, an organizing crew or a small org that has to keep running when things fail, the resilience route starts from the same field opsec and heads toward continuity. Take The Independence Path →
You cannot make a fixed Wednesday
Then take the recordings tier and do it at 3am. Every class is filmed with its written curriculum, the five guides are free, and the standups run every week so you still have somebody to ask. Nothing about that is the consolation prize.
Someone is in your accounts right now
That is an incident, not a curriculum, and a class next Wednesday is the wrong instrument. Go and work through the Digital Security Reset tonight — it is free and it opens with the next ten minutes. Come back afterwards and make the second time harder.
One thing this track will not do, on any tier: tell you that you are safe. You finish it able to say what you are exposed to, what you have closed, and what you decided to live with.
The Defender
You already know what you are worried about.
The guides are free and you can start one in the next minute. The classes are the part where you stop reading about it and change something on the device in your hand, starting Wednesday 30 September with Home Network Defense.
$250 a month: every class on this track recorded, its written curriculum, and the standups every week. $500 a month: the same, plus a seat in every class while it runs. Cancel either whenever it stops being worth it — that is the whole arrangement.