Clinical Computer Security for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

Digital insecurity in the face of targeted, persistent attacks increasingly leaves victims in debilitating or even life-threatening situations. We propose an approach to helping victims, what we call clinical computer security, and explore it in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV is widespread and abusers exploit technology to track, harass, intimidate, and otherwise harm their victims. We report on the iterative design, refinement, and deployment of a consultation service that we created to help IPV victims obtain in-person security help from a trained technologist. To do so we created and tested a range of new technical and non-technical tools that systematize the discovery and investigation of the complicated, multimodal digital attacks seen in IPV. An initial field study with 44 IPV survivors showed how our procedures and tools help victims discover account compromise, exploitable misconfigurations, and potential spyware.