Q&A: Kristin Antin of NGO-ISAC on Community, Care, and Feeling a Little Safer

NGO-ISAC's Director of Community and Partnerships on why connection, care, and small practical steps matter more than ever for the organizations on the front lines, and what's ahead at NGO-ISAC's conference this November.

Kristin Antin, Director of Community and Partnerships, NGO-ISAC

Kristin Antin realized how much technology could serve human rights in 2007, when she helped a torture treatment center in Uganda build a database to protect and organize its information. Nearly two decades later, that same conviction drives her work at NGO-ISAC, the Non-Governmental Organization Information Sharing and Analysis Center. Her job is to make sure the civil society organizations in NGO-ISAC's community can share with and learn from each other in the most useful way possible.

That work matters more than ever. Small, under-resourced organizations doing frontline work are highly targeted, and many are bracing for doxxing, swatting, and harassment campaigns they feel are only a matter of time. NGO-ISAC's answer is community: peers who have each other's backs, practical resources, and space to practice responding before an incident happens.

Kanary is an NGO-ISAC partner, and NGO-ISAC uses Kanary to protect its team. Ahead of NGO-ISAC's conference in Washington, D.C., we'll be joining NGO-ISAC on November 16 for an in-person tabletop workshop for their members on responding to digital and physical harassment.

In this Q&A, Kristin talks about what drew her to NGO-ISAC, where organizations feel most unsupported, why cybersecurity needs more care, and what she hopes members take home this fall.

"We can't fix everything at once, and we can't prevent every threat from happening, but there are steps we can take to mitigate negative risk and impacts. The goal is for all of us to sleep a little bit better at night knowing that our teams and communities are safe."

Building a community for civil society security

Tell us about NGO-ISAC and your role.

NGO-ISAC stands for Non-Governmental Organization Information Sharing and Analysis Center. As Director of Community and Partnerships, my role is to make sure the community is able to share and learn from each other in the most useful way. I'm also building out our partnership program, mapping the space so members know which partners can really help with specific needs. Kanary is one of those partners, and we often recommended the platform for non-profits looking to reduce digital and physical risk. 

What drew you to NGO-ISAC?

I first joined NGO-ISAC as a member in 2024, when I was working at the Center for Victims of Torture. I was supporting human rights defenders in exile with their cyber, physical, and holistic security, and a colleague thought the community would be useful for me. It definitely was. It was hugely helpful for connecting me with resources, and everyone I interacted with was welcoming, responsive, and kind. I went to the 2024 conference at the Ford Foundation in New York City, and it was a really positive experience. There were a lot more women there than I'd expected, too!

Then in January 2025, I lost my job, along with thousands of other people in the nonprofit sector. I remembered my positive experience, reached out to NGO-ISAC, and the open role ended up being a great fit.

What keeps you in mission-driven work?

I really appreciate the shared values of the people working in this space. I want to make an impact. I have a master's degree in human rights because it's something I truly believe in: every person has those rights, and technology is one way we can help protect people. I've been working at the intersection of human rights, technology, and security for over fifteen years, and I'm grateful I've been able to stay.

Information is the heart of human rights work

How have you seen technology both enable and complicate mission-driven work?

At the heart of it, human rights and civil society work is about harnessing the power of information. It's about collecting the right information, making sense of it, and sharing it, and ideally that leads to justice and accountability. That leads to people being free. So it makes a lot of sense to know how to protect it, store it, and share it safely.

"At the heart of it, human rights and civil society work is all about information. That leads to justice. That leads to people being free."

And now AI is changing things quickly.

It's a really wild time and you can’t always believe what you see. In some cases, you don't know whether the person you're talking to is a real person or AI. That's why coming together in person at our conference in November is becoming a crucial part of community building. You can confirm these are real people. And it's going to take real people to wrangle AI and make sure things don't get out of control. We need to keep putting trust, agency, and empowerment in actual humans.

Where organizations feel unsupported

What are you hearing from members about online harassment and targeting?

There's definitely fear. It’s a small community so people hear about incidents their peers have faced, and they wonder if or when it will happen to them. That's especially true for small, under-resourced organizations that are really on the front lines and highly targeted. Those are the groups we're designing our upcoming sessions for.

Where do organizations feel most unsupported?

We recently tried a community documentation sprint on doxxing in our discussion group. One of the big questions was: what is an organization's duty of care to individual staff members who are harassed or doxxed because of the work they do? There are a few policies that have been shared, but not many.  So one very big gap is that it's not clear what an organization should actually do when it happens.

Often, the person filling that gap is the one working on cybersecurity at their organization, and usually they're the only one. They want to nudge leadership to adopt a policy, and they want to feel prepared. That's hard to learn on your own. But if they come to a tabletop exercise with their peers and experience what it would be like to respond to an incident, they start thinking: what resources and policies do we actually have? Then it's, "Okay, we're missing this, this, and this." Now they know what to work on to move their organization forward, and hopefully they have a few examples or templates from their peers.

We ran a tabletop like this at the HOPE conference in New York City in August, with both very technical and non-technical people. Kanary's CEO Rachel was there too. The technical people said, 

"I've done a bunch of incident response tabletops, but I've never been asked to practice empathy like this."

That was completely new for some of them, and fascinating feedback to hear. 

Organizations are weighing both their responsibility to staff and their liability when someone is targeted. How does that play out in your community?

In our community there's a strong tie between grantmakers and grantees, and when one gets hit, it can directly impact the other. If a grantee is attacked, it can go right back to the funder, and there could be a whole campaign against the funder using whatever information was taken. It works the other way, too: if a funder is attacked in the media, that can really impact its grantees. So whether you call it duty of care, responsibility, or liability, we're all in this together. We have to protect each other, because it's all connected.

Bringing more care into cybersecurity

People defending organizations, and people helping others in crisis, absorb a lot. How do you think about that human toll?

We've been talking about secondary and vicarious trauma in the human rights space for many years. Now it feels like these lessons and practices are coming to the cybersecurity space, too. Not all cybersecurity folks are mission-driven, but wouldn't it be great to bring more care into the cybersecurity world?

We're running a two-part briefing series on the human side of cybersecurity, all about why it's important to think about the people involved. I also recently watched a keynote by Joe Marshall of Cisco Talos called "You Can't Patch Burnout." It's about why we have to start taking care of each other in this field. Defending schools, hospitals, nonprofits and other vulnerable and critical institutions against devastating cyberattacks takes a toll on people. There is a lot of room here for learning and improvement.  

What's ahead this fall

Walk us through the series of events NGO-ISAC has lined up.

We're holding a briefing on responding to doxxing incidents, followed by a briefing on responding to swatting incidents. Those lead up to an in-person workshop on November 16 in Washington, D.C., right before the conference. We'll go through a tabletop simulation together. Not a scary one! It's a chance to get into character a little and practice responding to these kinds of incidents. It’s about learning alongside your peers. The full conference then follows on November 17. Learn more here. 

What do you want members to walk away with?

The number one thing is connection: connection to peers and others in this space who are dealing with similar challenges, learn from their efforts and share what you’ve learned through your mistakes and successes (no matter how small!). We want people to go home with a list of people they can call to ask for support.

Second, practical tools. I hope we'll come out of these events with templates, policy examples, and procedures we can share related to responding to doxxing, harassment, and swatting.

More than anything, I want people to feel a sense of community and empowerment: that they can do something about this, and that they have people who have their back when they need help.

Working with Kanary

NGO-ISAC uses Kanary for its own team. What has that been like?

Honestly, I do feel more protected because we're using Kanary. I remember when I first started using Kanary, I kept finding all this information about me that I needed to do something about. It worked really well, and it's really nice to feel a little bit safer knowing there's a service looking out for your information on the internet.

That feeling of safety is a big part of what I want all our staff and members to feel. People are very stressed right now. There's an extreme sense of urgency and uncertainty: elections are coming up, AI is changing everything, and there are so many reasons to be scared. But you can take small steps to make changes and introduce new protections, whether that's using something like Kanary for your staff or coming to a tabletop exercise where you learn things that make you and your colleagues safer.

What stands out to you about working with Kanary?

I didn't know much about Kanary until I met the CEO Rachel at the NGO-ISAC conference. NGO-ISAC had brought someone to the conference on a travel stipend: a woman who works with a vulnerable community, doing legal aid. She was responsible for cybersecurity on top of a million other things, and I really wanted her to leave with practical tools. She was looking for something to address digital risk, and I introduced her to Rachel during a networking break.

Rachel said, "Great, let's do this," and they talked for more than 45 minutes. I really appreciated that she stopped what she was doing and made this woman her priority in the moment. That's how Kanary treats everyone I see their staff interact with, and the kind of care our community needs more of.

Join us on November 16

Team Kanary will be in Washington, D.C. on November 16 to co-host the NGO-ISAC's in-person tabletop workshop. If you're attending, come participate. 

Learn more and get involved with NGO-ISAC here.

Book a demo to learn more about how Kanary supports NGO-ISAC members.