Google has launched Project Shield to help protect small news and human rights websites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by using Google’s own DDoS mitigation technology. Project Shield is built on Google’s PageSpeed service. Sites hosted by Project Shield would sit behind PageSpeed’s infrastructure, allowing Google to pool its resources if any one website is DDoSed.
“We’re able to take the people who face the greatest threats to [distributed denial of service] attacks and get them behind our protection. If they face an attack, it has to get through us first, and after years of working on this we’re pretty good at stopping these attacks. The thing that can take many of these sites offline is so small to us. We can absorb it,” said CJ Adams, an associate with Google.
Adams described Project Shield as a combination of Google’s Page Speed service (which gives webmasters the option to have Google host and serve their websites for them for faster loadtimes) with Google’s internal DDOS mitigation abilities (which take advantage of its massive server capacity and ability to filter large data sets like combing the IP addresses of a flood of visitors to a website for malicious traffic).
Explains Google on its website:
“Millions of people across the world rely on websites for receiving information, connecting with others, and sharing ideas. For small, independent media or human rights organizations, a website might be the only voice they have. These types of websites have increasingly become the target for DDoS attacks, preventing access to important information.
“DDoS attacks are a type of digital attack where a flood of unwanted traffic is maliciously used to make a target site unavailable to its users. The hosting server can’t differentiate ‘fake’ from genuine traffic, and as it is overcome by the increase in requests, it slows down, or is taken completely offline.
“Google Ideas has launched Project Shield – an initiative that uses Google’s own DDoS mitigation technology to provide protection for free expression online, by allowing other websites to serve their content through Google’s infrastructure.
“The service is currently available for ‘trusted testers’ on an invite-only basis. People with sites serving media, elections and human rights related content are invited to apply for an invite.”
During the testing process, Project Shield will be free. Google might charge in the future, but participants will get a 30-day notice. “We’re hoping to offer the service to charities and non-profits at a reduced fee or at no cost in the future, but this is still under development,” Google announced.
