For years, the digital risks facing private enterprises and civil society seemed to exist in separate worlds. At Resilience Technologies, we have watched that divide slowly dissolve until the boundary ceased to exist.
For a long time, the distinction was clear (and I daresay, obvious).
Enterprises planned for fraud, ransomware, intellectual property theft, and business disruption. Civil society organizations planned for surveillance, censorship, and politically motivated interference. The adversaries were different, the incentives were different, and the defenses reflected that separation.
That separation no longer reflects reality.
The divide is shrinking and many of the civil society organizations we support are increasingly dealing with the same categories of risk as commercial entities.
So, what changed?
Historically, civil society adopted technology cautiously and reactively. From email and websites in the late 1990s to social media and cloud tools in the 2010s, technology was largely a means of communication, coordination and organizing.
Over the last five years, that shift has gone from cautious to widespread.
From working in an ecosystem that was traditionally averse to technology and infrastructure not explicitly known to them, today, we routinely work with organizations whose core operations depend on:
- Cloud-hosted collaboration suites,
- AI-powered transcription and translation tools,
- Donor and beneficiary databases,
- Automated research and content-generation systems,
- Remote-first teams operating across borders.
This shift has delivered real advantages such as speed, scale, effectiveness and reach. But it has also produced a predictable outcome that civil society is only beginning to fully reckon with: civil society organizations now look- from a threat perspective- much more… like enterprises.
Why Civil Society Is Now on the Radar of Cybercriminals
In our investigations and incident response work, we are beginning to see attacks that have no ideological motive at all and that might be surprising to many civil society organizations.
Financially motivated actors do not distinguish between a humanitarian organization and a technology startup. They look for exposed credentials, misconfigured cloud services, and data that can be monetized or used for extortion.
Recent threat intelligence reports reinforce this shift. Check Point’s African Perspectives on Cyber Security Report 2025 shows that between January to September 2025, organisations across Africa experienced an average of over 3,100 cyberattacks per organisation per week, among the highest frequencies recorded globally. Much of this activity is not ideologically driven, but opportunistic: automated scanning, credential abuse, phishing, and ransomware attempts conducted at scale. As civil society organisations adopt the same cloud-based systems and digital workflows as commercial entities, they now sit directly on this path.
This does not replace political risk. It compounds it. Organizations are increasingly exposed to state-linked surveillance and non-state criminal activity at the same time, often through the same systems.
2026 Risk Forecast: What We Expect
Based on our ongoing work across sub-Saharan Africa and an evaluation of the current threat landscape, four risk areas stand out for civil society organizations in 2026.
1. Industrialized Social Engineering in an Election Year
The use of AI in social engineering is no longer theoretical. Over the past year, documented cases in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States have shown generative AI being used to clone voices, fabricate video calls, and produce highly convincing impersonation messages to deceive targets and trigger fraudulent actions. These cases demonstrate capabilities that are now being adapted for use in political and civic contexts, where trust and timing are decisive.
2026 is a significant election year across parts of the continent, including Uganda, Zambia, Benin, and Ethiopia. In each of these contexts, civil society organizations play central roles in voter education, election monitoring, litigation support, and public accountability.
At the same time, generative AI has made it easier to produce highly convincing impersonation emails, fake statements, manipulated audio, and misleading visual material at scale.
Research from CIPESA’s Digital Shadows study has shown how disinformation tactics (including synthetic media) are disproportionately used against women in politics and journalism. In our own work, we have seen early signs of these tactics being adapted to target civil society organizations themselves: impersonating staff, undermining credibility, or attempting to discredit findings before they are released.
The risk here is not simply reputational harm. It is pre-emptive disruption; preventing organizations from being trusted at the moment their work matters most.
2. The Supply Chain Trap
Before now, this was scarcely a risk one would mention in the same sentence as “civil society” but this is now the reality.
Civil society organizations are increasingly dependent on external tools: AI transcription services, cloud storage providers, CRM platforms, and collaborative research tools. Many of these are affordable and effective, but few are fully understood from a security or data governance perspective.
Industry data consistently shows that a growing proportion of security incidents stem from cloud misconfigurations and excessive permissions rather than malware. In the NGO environments we assess, we frequently encounter “permission drift”: former staff retaining access, over-privileged service accounts, and integrations that were never reviewed after deployment.
For organizations relying on freemium or low-cost tools with opaque security practices, this creates a quiet but significant risk. Even where internal practices improve, third-party compromise can expose sensitive information without warning.
3. Ransomware as Operational Pressure
Ransomware remains a persistent threat, but its impact on civil society is distinct.
In 2025, global reporting showed a sharp increase in ransomware victims across all sectors. In Africa, countries such as South Africa and Egypt continue to record some of the highest ransomware detection rates on the continent.
For civil society organizations, the consequences go beyond financial loss. We have seen cases where access to beneficiary records, legal files, or operational systems was disrupted at critical moments. In humanitarian and health contexts, this kind of disruption can have immediate human consequences.
Attackers understand this dynamic. The leverage lies not in wealth, but in urgency.
4. Surveillance Is No Longer the Exception
For many civil society organizations, surveillance is no longer a worst-case scenario. It is a recurring condition of the work.
Over the past few years, we have seen colleagues across Nigeria, Uganda, and Ethiopia discover that their phones were monitored while they were documenting abuses. In most cases, there was no warning, no strange messages, no visible breach. By the time suspicion emerged, they were already sitting ducks.
What is different in 2026 is commodification. The market for “Mercenary Spyware” (Access-as-a-Service) has exploded, breaking the state monopoly on high-end surveillance. While top-tier tools like Pegasus remain expensive, a flooded market of lower-tier commercial spyware has made targeted monitoring accessible to smaller regimes, local police forces, and even private political actors. Civil society actors are being monitored not because they are powerful, but because they are exposed.
This risk is amplified by our new reliance on AI tools. Organizations use these tools daily to draft reports and summarize sensitive interviews, assuming safety in their shiny use cases. But this creates a paradox: Surveillance does not need to break the tool; it only needs to watch the user. When an activist feeds a sensitive interview into a “free” AI transcription bot, they are often voluntarily handing that data to a third-party vendor with opaque privacy policies.
Moving from Adoption to Resilience
From our work, one conclusion is clear: the answer is not to slow innovation, but to change how it is approached.
Three shifts are critical for civil society in 2026:
Identity must be treated as critical infrastructure.
In remote-first, cloud-based environments, compromised accounts are the most common entry point. Strong multi-factor authentication and disciplined access management are among the most effective controls available.
Security must be part of technology adoption, not an afterthought.
Donors and organizations alike need to account for secure configuration, data governance, and ongoing maintenance when adopting new tools, particularly AI-enabled services.
Resilience must be collective.
As civil society inherits enterprise-grade risk, it must also benefit from shared intelligence and coordinated defense. Stronger information sharing pipelines between civil society and trusted private sector partners are no longer optional. Our work with Zeroth Cloud (www.rtafrica.org/zerothcloud) will solve this problem in 2026.
The boundary that once existed has not merely shifted; it is now non-existent. In its place is a landscape where cybercrime, surveillance, and AI-enabled deception converge through the same systems civil society now relies on to operate. The defining question for 2026 is not whether civil society should adopt technology, but whether it can do so with the resilience, discipline, and collective defence this new reality demands.