Over the past three weeks, we have been working with our partners and contributors in Ukraine to identify community needs and understand major threats on the ground so we can focus our support based on their feedback. We sent questionnaires and followed up with semi-structured interviews, and we’re sharing below some key threats they mentioned, as well as the tools we’ve localized into Ukrainian that address these needs directly. Here are the key points contributors mentioned:

Civil society groups on the ground are particularly concerned about Internet disruption that leave cities in the dark, like yesterday's disruption to internet service in Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine; and
Possibility for more cyberattacks on Ukraine's private companies, government sector, or critical infrastructure (e.g. energy production and transmission, water, healthcare, and telecommunications). A contributor noted “The biggest threats now are cyberattacks on the government sector and some private companies” including the following:
- Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: a malicious attempt to disrupt the regular traffic of a targeted service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic, such as the denial of service attack that knocked out the Ukrainian banks last week.
- BGP hijacks: a disruption of the usual operation of the primary Internet protocol, “Border Gateway Protocol” by falsely routing through different services or networks. Some incidents can result from human error, but many are done intentionally on a regular basis, such as the Russian telco that hijacked internet traffic for several companies and cloud service providers.

Disinformation and malinformation: it has been reported by the contributors that certain images and videos push false narratives on what is happening on the ground. One contributor noted in early February “There is a rush of the spread of disinformation and propaganda across the internet and social media platforms, we have already seen many fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter about fake news on what is going to happen in Ukraine, some images and videos to push false narratives.”

We have prepared a list of localized tools, resources, and services available in Ukrainian for supporting digital infrastructure, secure messaging, circumventing censorship, and digital safety.

Attacks on Digital Infrastructure

Deflect: protects your website from a multitude of cyber attacks, including distributed denial of service (DDoS), brute force attacks against your login password, and connection hijacking
*Ukrainian localization is currently underway.
Qurium offers secure hosting and support to civil society, independent media, and human rights organizations through Virtual Road by using mirroring to keep websites up after a DDoS attack by downloading a copy of all of the files (images and script files) from the site. Mirroring is different from backing up because it’s creating a static copy where the admin cannot do anything dynamic, like log in, edit posts, or post comments.

Circumvention Tools to Access Censored Content

CENO (Censorship.no!) (Android): a mobile web browser, used to circumvent Internet censorship infrastructure, allowing users living in a censored zone to share retrieved content.
Onion Browser (iOS): a free and open-source web browser for iPhone and iPad that encrypts and tunnels web traffic through the Tor network, with extra features to help you browse the internet privately.
Orbot (Android): a free and open-source proxy app that uses Tor to encrypt and anonymize Internet traffic across mobile applications.
Psiphon: (Android, iOS): an open-source Internet censorship circumvention tool that uses a combination of secure communication and obfuscation technologies (VPN, SSH, and HTTP Proxy).

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging

Signal (Android, iOS, Desktop): an open-source secure messaging application that uses end-to-end encryption on everything, making it an excellent tool to communicate when in fear of government surveillance.
Wire (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and web browser): offers a collaboration suite featuring messenger, voice calls, video calls, conference calls, file-sharing, and external collaboration.
Briar (Android): does not rely on a central server, so does not store data on the cloud, sync via Bluetooth/WiFi/Internet, allows the users to connect directly with nearby contacts without Internet access, making messaging possible with low-bandwidth or when Internet access is blocked.
Matrix: an open standard for real-time decentralized communication that allows users to communicate across different service providers using a number of cross-platform clients including Element.
Delta Chat (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux): a decentralized messenger that sends messages via email with encryption via AutoCrypt when possible. Users can use existing email accounts to communicate via Delta Chat and messages can be sent to any email address.
Element (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Web App): a decentralized, encrypted video-audio chat platform powered by Matrix (and recommended by eQualitie)
Fireside (Android, iOS): a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer messaging application that uses the NewNode peer-to-peer protocol. Messages can be sent over a wifi connection or through a network of connected devices when wifi is not available.