When abuse goes digital: Applying cyber security to domestic and family violence

At 11:42 pm, a survivor receives another message from an account she has already blocked three times. The sender references her location with unsettling accuracy. Her devices show no obvious compromise. Her credentials are strong. From a traditional cyber security perspective, there are no clear indicators of compromise. But the pattern tells a different story.

What appears as isolated digital activity is often a coordinated pattern of coercive control enabled through legitimate technologies, open-source data, and behavioural exploitation. These cases expose a growing gap in cyber practice: threats that sit outside conventional detection models, but still cause real-world harm.

Technology-facilitated abuse is now a significant and under-recognised threat vector, intersecting with identity security, OSINT exposure, account misuse, and human-layer vulnerabilities. Yet it rarely fits neatly within existing cyber frameworks, playbooks, or response models.

This session demonstrates how intelligence tradecraft within the cyber security domain can be applied to domestic and family violence.

Drawing on operational work from the Digital Resilience Project, this presentation shows how techniques such as:

• Attribution analysis using open-source signals;
• Behavioural pattern mapping across accounts and platforms; 
• Risk-based triage under uncertainty; and 
• Structured hypothesis testing can help identify, assess, and respond to technology-facilitated threats in cases of domestic and family violence.

Rather than focusing on tools or detection alone, this session reframes the problem as one of analysis, context, and decision-making under ambiguity - a space where intelligence methodologies provide a critical advantage.