We believe in empowering organisations and grassroots movements with self-sufficiency in their work, freeing them from costly and high-risk dependence on third-party infrastructure providers and tech talent. For this training is key, skilling you up to look after your needs as you understand them, on your own terms.
Independent and able
From acquiring the knowledge needed to secure your infrastructure, to helping you mitigate adversarial threats or operational contingencies in your work, our training packages will empower your organisation to new heights of efficiency and security.
To ensure knowledge survives role-rotations in your organisation or movement, we also offer train-the-trainer (TtT) sessions, such that our provided documentation, tools and teaching methods can be tailored to fit your needs, cycled through your team as it changes.
Having the knowledge to meet your needs ‘in house’ brings independence, reactive agility, lower costs, lower risk, and increased team morale.
Lowering the technical entry barrier
We specialise in training those with little-to-no prior technical background, having done so for activists, university students and conference attendants the world over. Platform administration, information and operational security basics, can all be brought to those without computer science degrees nor any prior contact with such domains.
Nīkau Intensive Learning Packages
We presently offer two intensive courses, alongside focussed classes, as needed.
Information and Operations Security
Live intensive course @ 12hrs, max 30 participants or 2 Trainers
- Threat modeling
- Smartphone and laptop lockdown
- Credentials storage, security and authentication
- Pre- and post arrest security
- Staying safe online
- Email and messaging security
- Counter-surveillance and counter-tracking
- Secure backups and recovery
- Digital hygiene
- Privilege separation and airgapping
- Social Engineering
- Preparing devices for actions
Focussed classes
These classes are focussed sessions on any one of the topics in our Information and Operational Security course. Should you need coverage of more than one topic, get in touch and we’ll tailor a series around your needs.
Live intensive course @ 1-2hrs, max 30 participants or 2 Trainers
Server Administration for the At Risk
This 2 module course covers key topics and skill sets to responsibly administer and secure a server for a high-risk community. In completing this material, students emerge as capable and responsible system administrators for an at-risk group, managing, securing and maintaining a server complete with productivity and organisational tooling able to support communities both small and vast.
Module 1: Foundations
This module provides the grounding material and training to administer a server, suited for a person with minimal technical background. ‘Hands on’, a server is created specifically for the training.
On its own this module is insufficient training to responsibly administer a server for an at-risk group. For this, the Module 2 is required. Experienced sysadmins however do not need to complete Module 1, solely Module 2.
Live intensive course @ 30hrs, 15hrs self-study, max 2 participants
- Overview of roles and responsibilities
- Working with the GNU/Linux command line
- Working with the GNU/Linux filesystem
- Overview of GNU/Linux server distributions
- Privileges and permissions
- Secure key storage
- Remote administration
- Anatomy of a server
- Disks and devices
- Networking fundamentals
- Logging
- Package management
- Upgrades and maintenance
- Securing the Transport Layer
- Mail transport
- Webserver fundamentals
- Introduction to containerisation
- Introduction to virtualisation
- Introduction to firewalling
- Introduction to monitoring
- Diagnostics and debugging
- Automation and shell scripting
- Offsite encrypted backups and recovery
- Free and open source productivity tooling and platform overview
- Deploying a server
- Documenting your work
Module 2: Guardianship
This module is dedicated to situating the system administrator in a position of guardianship over the infrastructure of a group at-risk. It employs time-tested best practices, and is suited to sysadmins of any level.
Live intensive course @ 30hrs, 10hrs self-study, max 2 participants
- Sourcing and securing a ‘burner’ laptop for system administration
- Threat modeling and adversarial projection
- Active and passive firewalling
- Intrusion detection
- Privilege separation
- Containerisation and Virtualisation
- Service isolation and jailing
- Webserver hardening
- Reverse proxies
- Malware detection and mitigation
- 0days, CVEs and patching
- Hardening mail transport
- Disk and at-rest encryption
- Zero-knowledge and E2EE fundamentals
- Securely deploying and managing a VPN
- OS hardening
- Lockouts and lockdown
- Working while travelling: OpSec and safeguards
- Social Engineering: detection, de-escalation and mitigation
- Data protection, the law and holder’s rights
- Selecting a jurisdiction for your deployment
- Finding, vetting and training your backup
- Time-management and sysadmin self-care
Contact us
Get in touch to book a training session with us.