Help Maintain Secure Networks in Ukraine

It is critical for Ukrainians to maintain secure communications and free access to information. This is under threat by coordinated DDoS attacks and other cybersecurity threats.

These threats pale in comparison to the real life tragedies Ukrainians are facing moment by moment. People are dying.

Any help we can offer is not enough, but our experience is in virtual networking, so we are offering services that may help. Demand for VPN’s has increased dramatically in Ukraine this month.

If you are in Ukraine and need a simple VPN, you have free options.

Free VPN’s for Users in Ukraine

IVPN: https://www.ivpn.net/blog/in-support-of-ukraine

ClearVPN: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/28/get-a-free-year-of-vpn-access-with-macpaws-clearvpn

Atas VPN (for journalists only): https://atlasvpn.com/blog/atlas-vpn-hands-out-vpn-subscriptions-to-support-journalists-in-ukraine

We recommend setting up multiple VPN’s in order to defend against outages in any one. It is good to have backup.

If you are somewhat technical or are an organization in need of help, we can provide resources for you.

What Gravitl is Doing

Gravitl is providing no-cost hosted services for organizations in need:

• Socks5 proxies
• TOR bridges
• Signal proxies
• WireGuard (VPN) servers
• Netmaker servers
• Misc tools (file sharing services, compression, etc)

If you are in Ukraine and need any of these, email support-ukraine@gravitl.com, and we will respond with access and configuration instructions.

These are very technical resources. If you need help with setup, let us know in the email. If you have any urgent special requests outside of the listed services, let us know and we will do our best to help.

To be clear, this is not enough

Secure networking doesn’t matter if you can’t access the internet, and ISP’s are under attack in Ukraine as well, causing outages. The only solution to this is satellite-based internet like Starlink, but they need 1000x what Starlink is able to deliver. We wish there was more we can do here. If you have ideas, let us know in the comments.

What can you do as a non-Ukrainian?

Most methods of secure/anonymous internet access rely on 3rd party servers. These 3rd party servers can be easily blocked by states that control ISP’s. However, you can create your own servers which can be used as jumping points. It all depends on what the end user is using. Here are a few examples:

TOR Bridges: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/censorship-7/

Signal Proxy Servers: https://signal.org/blog/help-iran-reconnect/

WireGuard Servers: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04

Importantly, you need a way of making these available to Ukrainians without getting flooded by bad actors, which is a whole other problem.

Outside of these services, try following the IT Army of Ukraine to see what they need.

Lastly, you can donate.