Google has announced that it’s opening its anti-DDoS Project Shield technology to all online news websites as
First announced back in 2013, Project Shield has been in testing for more than two years now with a select group of organizations. The service aims to counteract attempts to bring websites down using distributed denial of service (DDoS) — a technique that overwhelms a website with traffic to take the network offline. Or, to use an analogy from VentureBeat’s original Project Shield report: “DDoS attacks are the Internet equivalent to packing a women’s shoe store with men asking for hats.”
DDoS attacks can be used for a number of reasons — to threaten or intimidate companies into complying with the demands of a criminal group, to inconvenience, or even to censor online content.
Google is pitching Project Shield as means to leverage the company’s existing security infrastructure and prevent such attacks on websites belonging to media outlets or even human rights organizations.
“We learned tons from our early group of Project Shield testers,” explained Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, and Advisor to executive chairman at Google’s parent company, Alphabet. “Not only have we kept websites online during attacks that otherwise would have taken them offline, we learned crucial information about how these types of attacks happen, and how we can improve our services to defend against them. With this expansion, tens of thousands of news sites will have access to Project Shield.”
Though the technique is at the simpler end of the cyber attack spectrum, DDoS has become increasingly more sophisticated and prevalent in recent times, and has been used to bring down everything from online games stores to law enforcement agencies themselves.
This is what Project Shield is all about. Given that it’s free to use, it focuses specifically on smaller organizations that may not have the money or expertise to combat such exploits.