The goal of Civilsphere project is to provide simple solutions for NGOs and people at risk for detecting attacks in their devices using our network behavioral Intrusion Detection and Prevention System, Stratosphere IPS.

Advancements in digital technology have made it easy for governments to surveil, track, spy, and abuse the human rights of political activists, journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers and NGOs. However, state-of-the-art digital security is only affordable to business organizations. Without resources and being attacked by powerful actors puts our civil society at risk. The cases investigated by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International indicate only the tip of the iceberg.

And that is why Civilsphere was born in the Stratosphere laboratory of the Czech Technical University in Prague in 2018. We believe that NGOs' work, as well the work of journalists and human rights defenders, is a critical asset for our society, protecting human rights and civil liberties. It is their critical work that makes them a highly valuable political target for a wide variety of powerful actors. The end result is a continuous flow of attacks and technical abuse. Civilsphere’s mission is to provide people at risk free services and tools to early identify digital threats jeopardizing their life and work.

We are honored to place third in the Czech SDGs Awards 2021. This competition, organized by the Association of Social Responsibility, recognizes projects that carry out the United Nations sustainable development goals. We placed third in the Public Sphere category. In total, 238 projects were submitted to the competition.

Civilsphere in action

We offer four services for free:
1) Emergency VPN using ML to detect threats and leaks in network traffic
2) Website www.shouldiclick.org to detect phishing
3) Verification of emails
4) Cloud-based malware detection

Our services have been working for 3 years with innovative and state-of-the-art technology. We protected +400 activists worldwide in +10 countries, +5000 hosts inside NGOs, verified +5000 URLs in real time, and reported +50 insecure apps. We are now working on a new fully automated, free-software and scalable version which will allow anyone to integrate their VPN with our free-software machine learning based intrusion prevention system to automatically identify, block and report infections in real time.

Visit the project's own website: www.civilsphereproject.org.

Civilsphere Team