Digital First Aid Kit (Access Now / RaReNet)
Summary
The Digital First Aid Kit, jointly maintained by Access Now and the RaReNet network, is the standard emergency guide for activists whose accounts, websites, or devices are under active attack. It is published under Creative Commons Attribution, ships in multiple languages, and is the gap-filler for incidents where preventive digital-security guidance has already failed.
Body
https://www.accessnow.org/digital-first-aid-kit/
The kit is structured around the question “something bad just happened — what now?” rather than around the threat-modelling question SSD addresses. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid] Each chapter opens with a recognisable symptom (account locked out, account posting things you did not write, phone behaving strangely, website defaced or DDoS’d, malware suspected) and walks the reader through a triage tree that ends in either a self-remediation path or a referral to a helpline. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid]
The chapters are kept short and action-oriented: the kit assumes the reader is stressed, time-pressured, and possibly in physical danger, so the language avoids jargon and the steps are reversible where possible. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid] Each self-remediation path is paired with a “when to escalate” cue — to a helpline, to a peer organisation, or to law enforcement — because the most common failure mode in incident response is to keep self-remediating past the point where a specialist should have been called. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid]
Coverage is intentionally narrow: account compromise, malware, DDoS, device loss, doxxing, website defacement. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid] Coverage is intentionally not narrow on the language axis: the kit ships in English, French, Spanish, German, and several other languages, with editorial review by the RaReNet regional networks so that the steps make sense in the local incident-response ecosystem, not only in an Anglophone one. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid] Material is published under Creative Commons Attribution, permitting translation and adaptation with attribution; the kit has been adopted and re-published by regional rapid-response networks from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid]
The kit is distinct from the Access Now Help Desk (the operational hotline the kit refers to); it is the do-it-yourself counterpart, useful in jurisdictions or hours where the Help Desk is not reachable. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid] It is updated regularly; recent editions have added a SIM-swap response chapter and a stalkerware-detection checklist that earlier editions lacked. [source: accessnow-digital-first-aid]
Use it for
The first link to send when an activist reports an incident; the curriculum for an incident-response drill; a recommended bookmark for any group whose threat model includes account compromise.