Protecting Essential Information from Digital Attacks

Every country in the world now depends on the internet to spread critical information, ranging from investigative reporting, to emergency plans, to the details of when and where to vote. These sites are essential modern infrastructure, making them attractive targets for hackers seeking to sow chaos or undermine vital institutions.

To counter this threat, in partnership with Google Cloud, Jigsaw created Project Shield, a free service to protect news and elections-related sites from distributed denial of service attacks. DDoS attacks overwhelm a site’s servers in an effort to take it offline. Since launching in 2013, access to Project Shield has expanded to include sites for human rights, civic groups, and the arts and sciences. Most recently, Project Shield defended a prominent news site, Krebs on Security, from one of the largest DDoS attacks in history, ensuring his site remained online and a reliable source of news for readers.

Leveraging Google Cloud’s network, Project Shield delivers global-scale protection, with automatically tuned and always-on defenses, that detects and mitigates attacks within seconds. As DDoS attacks have become more sophisticated and widespread, Project Shield has evolved to include machine learning-based defenses and more advanced algorithms to stay one step ahead.

Project Shield now protects more than 3,000 vulnerable sites around the world.

To sign your site up for Project Shield protection, visit projectshield.google.