Google has built a free tool for journalists, news sites and other organizations, called Project Shield that re-routes nasty traffic through its own infrastructure in order to stop websites being overwhelmed.

[embed]https://youtu.be/YZqiF5Duh0U[/embed]

From Service Website:

Project Shield welcomes applications from websites serving news. Human rights and or elections monitoring content are also welcome to apply. We do not provide service to other types of content, including gaming, businesses, or individual blogs.

All data collected are used only “for DDoS mitigation and caching and to improve the Project Shield service”.

What is a DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.

They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.

(from http://www.digitalattackmap.com/understanding-ddos/)

[embed]https://youtu.be/NogCN78XN2w[/embed]

How it works?

Any site that signs up for Project Shield can make a change to their domain name configuration that redirects visitors to a Google server that acts as a reverse proxy designed to filter out malicious traffic and cache some elements of the site to lighten the load on the website’s servers.

Not for all!

You will need a Google account to use the service, but the service is not for all websites:

Project Shield welcomes applications from websites serving news. Human rights and or elections monitoring content are also welcome to apply.

We do not provide service to other types of content, including gaming, businesses, or individual blogs.

Google chose to offer Project Shield specifically to news organizations because in many cases those groups

“depend entirely on their web presence to get information to the public”.

Links and resources