Google’s Project Shield protects news and human rights sites from DDoS attacks

Project Shield is only one of several projects subsidiary Jigsaw (recently renamed from Google Ideas) are working on to help tackle current global political challenges through technology development.

The news comes shortly after Arbor Networks, a DDoS tracking company found that attacks are exhibiting flood power of 100 GBPS, compared with peak attacks of 50 GBPS in 2009.

However, the project’s early product manager, C.J. Adams was careful to assure users that Google has no plans to commercialize any data they gain from Project Shield.

DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, as you’re likely aware, involve the flooding of the victim with huge amounts of traffic from many sources that overwhelms and takes the site down.

Project Shield is created to reroute traffic through Google’s web infrastructure, and is being offered as a free tool to news organisations and websites seeking to expose corruption. Google’s parent company, Alphabet has a number of subsidiary companies, some of which are not focused primarily on generating profits but on fulfilling Google’s wider goals through research and development.

Project Shield is now out of its invite-only beta period to offer free DDoS protection to news publications that apply for it. In particular, it is aimed at smaller news sites who do not have the resources to pay for costly protection against cyber attacks.

“These attacks threaten free expression and access to information…” After that, traffic coming to the site is routed through an intermediate, Google-owned intermediate “reverse proxy” server that can filter out malicious traffic. However, it will also be open to any independent site that appears in Google News, including larger corporate publications.

According to Google, it will not be placing ads on websites it protects and says using the service won’t impact the ability for websites to target advertising or analyse advertising data.

Jigsaw also has the Password Alert service that can warn crusading journalists and activists if their Google password is being entered into a dodgy log-in page looking to swipe the credentials through phishing attacks.

Additionally, for the few news sites in the world that actually have enabled SSL, Project Shield does support this security feature.