Shira
Ayudando a personas y organizaciones a construir su resiliencia contra ataques de phishing
¿Quién hace Shira?
Shira is built by Horizontal, a non-profit dedicated to digital privacy and security. We are a distributed team of security trainers and technologists who have been on digital security for nearly a decade: we've helped and trained human rights defenders, journalists, and non-profits protect themselves online, in some of the highest-risk contexts in the world.
Shira is that experience, built into a tool. Shira is made by the same team behind Tella, an app used by over 25,000 people worldwide to protect their sensitive files and data on their phone.
Aprende sobre Horizontal
¿Por qué Shira?
Phishing is one of the most common ways attacks exploit people and compromise organizations.
And yet, most tools built to train vulnerable against phishing were punitive by design, generic, and disconnected from the real threats they faced every day.
How it started
For most people, falling for a phishing attack means stolen data or money. But for the human rights defenders, journalists, and activists Horizontal works with, a single message can threaten not just their data, but their safety, and the safety of the people around them.
In 2022, a Horizontal trainer stood in front of a room of human rights activists. As part of this digital security training, the trainer aimed to teach participants to recognize phishing attacks and what to do when faced with one. The trainer was unsatisfied with the tools available, too generic and lacking in customizability, so they used screenshots of phishing emails and text messages to teach the audience.
Back from the workshop, Horizontal decided to take this on. We gathered an advisory board of a dozen digital safety and cybersecurity experts, educators, and researchers from around the world. We talked to people about what they lacked in existing tools and what they wanted in a phishing education platform: which platforms to simulate, which contexts to leave out.
And we built it. With support from the Open Technology Fund, we started with a simple quiz. And we grew it from there.
How it's going
As digital security trainers began using Shira, demand grew fast. One trainer alone used it to train over a thousand people, and requests kept coming in for more contexts, more platforms, more languages than we could ever build ourselves.
So we opened Shira to a small group of partners. Over 30 organizations used it in very different ways: one digital security group ran it across a dozen workshops for human rights organizations, a reproductive health nonprofit used it to train 200 staff internally.
This diversity of trainers and organizations shaped what Shira is today: a platform that is inherently open and is customizable in every possible way. Organizations can build their own library of questions, choose between open campaigns or private spaces only their team can access, invite hundreds of people at once, and see how each learner performed. Shira also grew to cover how people actually receive phishing attempts, not only email, but SMS, WhatsApp, and other messaging apps, on both mobile and desktop.
Want to see how organizations use Shira day to day? Read our Case Studies →
How we built it
Horizontality
Collective decision-making is part of our DNA.
Every time we release something new, we ask the people using Shira the same question: what do you need us to build next?
Community
We don't build for users, we build with them.
We are a non-profit and we develop Shira not just for the benefits of our users, but with their active involvement at every step of the process.
Holism
We think critically about our footprint, in what we build and how we operate.
From privacy to open-source and the environment.
Open
We believe sharing and collaboration are how we fulfill our mission.
Every line of Shira code is public. Anyone deciding whether to trust us with their team's security can look at it directly.
Want the details for your own security review?
Trust & Security