Over its years as an Internet behemoth, Google has learned a lot about fighting hackers who would knock its services off the web. Now it's offering its muscle to a far more vulnerable set of targets.
On Monday the company announced that it will offer free protection for websites against so-called "distributed denial-of-service" cyberattacks that flood them with junk traffic from hundreds or thousands of computers, taking them offline. The project, which is part of the company's Google Ideas initiative to take on global problems, has already been working for months with at-risk sites around the world in countries like Iran, Syria, Burma and other places where sites with political content are often subject to attack, and will expand in its initial phase to hundreds of sites.
"We're able to take the people who face the greatest threats to [distributed denial of service] attacks and get them behind our protection," says CJ Adams, an associate with Google who announced the Shield project at a company summit in New York. "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."
Among the beta users of Project Shield are the Persian-language political blog Balatarin, a Syrian website called Aymta that provides early warnings of scud missile launches, and an election monitoring website in Kenya called the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission. Adams said in his talk at the summit that Project Shield had enabled the Kenyan site to stay online through a Kenyan election for the first time in its attack-ridden history.
"The thing that can take many of these sites offline is so small to us. We can absorb it," says Adams. "That's made this something we can provide fairly easily...It has a huge impact for them, and we can take the hit."
Adams describes 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 to 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.
But unlike its Page Speed service, Adams says Google has no plans to offer Project Shield as a commercial service for developers, and instead is offering it as part of Google Ideas' philanthropic work, which since its launch three years ago focused on problems ranging from human trafficking and gang violence to online censorship and cybercrime.
In addition to the Shield protection service, Google is also launching a digital attack map to show real-time cyberattacks around the world, pulling data from the DDOS analysis service Arbor Networks. Google also announced that it's a project at the University of Washington to build a Chrome extension known as uProxy that allows users in repressive regimes to access the uncensored Internet via friends' computers.
Project Shield is still accepting applicants for its protection, and is focused on those subject to cyberattacks for censorship purposes, such as human rights, election monitoring and political sites. "If anyone purchase someone else's silence, that hurts the Internet and free expression," he says. "Your voices should never be silenced."
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