While the Armed Forces of Ukraine are bravely fighting against the Russian occupants, the Internet army can make its contribution with the help of a simple game
Play For Ukraine is a browser game created by a team of Ukrainian software engineers which enables Dedicated Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks against selected Russian government and media websites. Playing it brings a double pleasure of relaxing with a familiar puzzle while overwhelming target websites with fake traffic.
The game itself is another version of the simple sliding block puzzle “2048”. It has a 16-tile play field with numbered tiles. The aim is to merge the tiles with the same numbers to add them up. Once blocks have slid and merged, a new tile pops up at a random free location of the grid. The ultimate sum to reach is 2048, though you can continue to play and sum up the tiles for even higher results. The game is quite simple as it requires only basic arithmetic knowledge. The game has been around for almost a decade and proven to be a very popular and addictive brain teaser.
In Play for Ukraine, you don’t have to win. Each move made by every player is a step toward blocking important Russian web resources. The names of the websites under attack are kept secret, for security purposes. However, some of them apparently are Russian financial institutions, per the official Play for Ukraine Twitter account. One player during one hour is able to send about 20,000 requests to the websites that serve the Russian army.
The game is available around the world. It’s an easy way for teenagers and those who can’t help Ukraine materially to combat the unprecedented Russian military aggression.
Using VPN is optional, but it may be required in some regions. In particular, the developers urge you to turn on the VPN if you play from the territory of Ukraine. Otherwise, the game won’t be efficient. If you use a desktop version, the effect will be stronger. Even opening the game in a browser will help the Ukrainian IT army reach its goal.
The game launched on February 28, a few days after the brutal Russian invasion of a sovereign European country of Ukraine. As of March 24, it was forced to change the domain, as the original website version was blocked by Cloudflare. The reason is that some of the targets are Cloudflare’s clients in Russia.
In mid-March, the average number of users playing the game per minute was over 6000. Over 200 critical Russian websites were attacked successfully. If you’re willing to help the Ukrainian IT army, join the game and spread the word.
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