🛡️ The Defender · stay secure
Defend your devices, your accounts and the people you are responsible for.
$250 a month buys every class on this track, live — plus their recordings and their written curriculum. They work outward from the router in your house to the stranger on the phone who sounds exactly like your bank. You attend, you ask questions, you leave having done the thing on your own hardware.
Next in the room: Digital Identity Defense · Wednesday 26 August
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. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs in your browser and forgets you when you close the tab.
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. The live room gives you somebody watching your actual screen who can tell you whether what you are looking at is normal — every month, for as long as you are a member.
Join us · $250The 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, live, and each one ends with something changed on your actual devices rather than something noted down for later.
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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.
- locate every device on your own network
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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
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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
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
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04 Digital Identity Defense Wed 26 Aug
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
- falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
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
One price, the whole track live.
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.
Every class on the track, live
Every one of them, 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
- locate every device on your own network
- follow a device hardening checklist
- operate a callback rule against incoming contact
- classify an incoming contact as genuine or pretext
- configure recovery that survives losing the device
- falsify your own account recovery by attempting it
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.
Disqualifiers
Who this is not for.
You want to break in, not keep people out
This is defense, for you and the people you are responsible for. If what you want is a career testing other people's systems, you want a different track and a different school.
You want to do it alone at 3am
Every one of these is a live two-hour room on a fixed date, and you are expected to have the device open. For solo work at 3am, the guides above are free and nobody will ask you for an email address.
You want to be told you are safe
Nobody finishes this able to say they are secure. You finish it able to say what you are exposed to, what you have closed, and what you decided to live with.
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. Come back afterwards and make the second time harder.
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 26 August with Digital Identity Defense.
The Defender — Recordings, $250 a month, covering every class on this track, live, plus its recordings and its written curriculum. Cancel it whenever it stops being worth it — that is the whole arrangement.