Digital security in war and conflict has shifted from a specialist concern to a routine protection problem. Humanitarian and human rights actors increasingly treat digital harms as part of the risk landscape alongside physical threats and service disruption.
This is the premise of an Access Now webinar, “Digital security in war and conflict: challenges for civil society and tools for resilience,” hosted by the Digital Security Helpline as part of its “Safe and strong” series. The stated goal is to bring together civil society, private sector partners, and other support organizations to discuss how to increase resilience in the digital age.
Digital harms are now treated as conflict harms#
Access Now’s framing is direct: in armed conflict and humanitarian crises, people and organizations can be harmed through digital systems as well as through kinetic violence. That can include targeting of individuals, disruption of critical communications, and the exploitation of dependence on platforms and networks.
The announcement reflects a broader operational reality: many organizations that intervene and support affected communities have reoriented their work to help people stay safe online in crisis contexts. This work spans humanitarian protection, human rights, civil society support, and—increasingly—private sector participation.
What is changing is not just the threat landscape. It is the recognition that digital exposure can meaningfully shape outcomes: who can organize safely, who can document abuses, who can communicate with beneficiaries, and who becomes visible to adversaries.
What the webinar is (and what it is not)#
This source is an event page, not a technical report or incident write-up. It does not claim a new exploit, a specific campaign, or a quantified trend. It describes a planned discussion focused on threats and challenges for civil society in conflict settings, and it points to “tools for resilience” as the practical orientation.
The webinar is scheduled for May 19, 2026, at 9:00 am EST (15:00 CEST, 21:00 Philippines and Western Indonesia), with registration offered through the event page.
The “Safe and strong” series is described as an initiative of the Digital Security Helpline intended to convene civil society, private sector partners, and other support organizations. The underlying premise is that resilience is not built by one sector alone—especially when the infrastructure and platforms that shape safety are often operated by private companies.
Why civil society is a distinct target set#
Civil society groups, journalists, and human rights defenders often sit in an uncomfortable middle ground during conflict: visible enough to be targeted, resourced enough to be worth the effort, and dependent on digital tooling that was not designed for contested environments.
The event page highlights the Helpline’s role as a provider of 24/7 digital security assistance. That detail matters because crisis response rarely follows office hours, and “best practice” advice often collapses when the actual incident happens on a weekend, during a blackout, or amid displacement.
Even without enumerating specific attack types, the webinar’s focus implies a familiar set of civil society risk patterns:
- Reliance on consumer platforms for coordination and outreach
- High-value communications with sensitive sources or beneficiaries
- Documentation and evidence handling under adversarial scrutiny
- Increased exposure to phishing, account takeovers, and coercive access attempts
- Organizational fragility: limited staff, high turnover, and inconsistent security baselines
The source does not list these as claims; they are the practical contours that typically motivate “resilience” programming in this space. The key is that civil society threats are rarely only technical. They are operational: access, identity, trust, continuity, and the ability to work under pressure.
Who is involved#
The event page lists speakers and moderators across civil society, private sector, and humanitarian policy roles:
- An Associate Director in WITNESS’s Technology Threats & Opportunities program, with experience in digital rights, freedom of expression, and emerging technologies
- A Program Manager on Cloudflare’s Public Policy team, overseeing initiatives aimed at protecting human rights defenders, journalism organizations, and government entities online, and conducting training/threat briefings for civil society groups
- A Digital Rights Advocacy Lead at Oxfam, working on a multi-year, multi-country program connecting community-level action, policy influence, and corporate accountability on digital rights
- Access Now Digital Security Helpline staff providing program coordination and support
- Access Now’s Senior Humanitarian Officer, described as monitoring and advising on digital rights in conflict and disaster, and working on protection from digital harm through international humanitarian law norms and ethical approaches for private companies
This mix is a signal in itself. It suggests the conversation is not only about “how to use a tool,” but also about governance and responsibility: what support organizations can reasonably provide, what platforms can change or protect, and how conflict-era digital harm fits into humanitarian protection concepts.
Practical takeaways you can use today#
Because this is an event announcement, it does not provide step-by-step guidance. But its framing points to a set of actions that are consistently useful for civil society and support organizations working in conflict or crisis contexts.
1) Treat digital security as protection work, not IT hygiene#
If digital harms are recognized as conflict harms, then response should sit with operational leadership, not only with “the tech person.” The operational questions are concrete:
- What work stops if accounts are lost?
- Who is at greatest personal risk if communications are exposed?
- What information, if leaked, could cause real-world harm?
This changes prioritization. It also changes accountability: security work becomes part of duty of care.
2) Build for disruption, not normal conditions#
Conflict settings are defined by constraint. Plans should assume:
- intermittent connectivity
- device loss or confiscation
- staff displacement or rapid onboarding
- time pressure and incomplete information
Resilience often means having fallbacks: alternate contact channels, role-based access, and a way to recover accounts quickly.
3) Separate “evidence” workflows from “messaging” workflows#
Organizations that document abuses often blend collection, storage, analysis, and publication across the same devices and accounts. In contested environments, that is a fragile model.
Even without specific prescriptions, a useful principle is separation: treat evidence handling as a distinct workflow with tighter access control and clearer retention rules than public messaging.
4) Use external support early#
The event page emphasizes the Digital Security Helpline’s assistance role. The operational lesson is simple: incident response goes better when you ask for help before the situation is fully on fire.
If you have access to trusted rapid support (helplines, partner orgs, or security teams), pre-establish contact paths and escalation criteria. In a real crisis, “who do we call?” should not be a new question.
5) Expect cross-sector dependencies#
The “Safe and strong” series explicitly brings in private sector partners. That is not optional in practice: many civil society risks are mediated by platform policies, account integrity systems, content moderation, and infrastructure-level controls.
If your organization depends on specific services, map those dependencies and understand what protections exist (or do not exist) through those providers.
Why this matters now#
Access Now’s webinar announcement is a small artifact, but it captures a larger shift: digital safety is increasingly being discussed in the same breath as humanitarian protection and conflict response. That is a meaningful change in posture.
For civil society, the implication is not that every organization needs a full security team. It is that digital risk decisions are now core operational decisions, with real consequences for people.
For donors and partners, the implication is similar: “resilience” is not a vague capacity-building slogan. It is the ability to keep doing the work under adversarial pressure, with guardrails that reduce the chance of catastrophic exposure.
What to watch for#
If you follow this space, the most useful outputs from webinars like this are not general warnings. They are specific lessons about what fails in practice and what interventions scale.
Look for:
- concrete threat patterns observed by helpline responders (without over-claiming)
- practical recovery guidance (account recovery, device loss, safe re-onboarding)
- how private sector participants describe their constraints and levers
- how humanitarian framing (protection, duty of care, harm reduction) translates into day-to-day security choices
If Access Now publishes follow-up materials, those will likely carry more actionable detail than the event listing itself.