DDoS attack have become as common as a housefly over the web. Every single day, we see attacks in the double digits on significant websites. Google, in an attempt to prevent any more future attacks, on Wednesday announced Project Shield, a free tool for journalists, news sites and other organizations, that re-routes heavy traffic through the company’s servers in an attempt to prevent a ‘down site’.
Distributed Denial of Service is one of the most common ways in which an individual or organisation can make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. Over the past year or so, the frequency of occurrence of DDoS attacks has risen exponentially and many major news websites and other services have been target to this type of an ambush.
Google Ideas, recently renamed Jigsaw, has brought forward a new application that aims to protect non-government owned news sites. The main targets of project shield are small, under-resourced news sites, though even larger corporate news sites are also eligible for a trial, according to Project Shield team lead George Conard.
“Just about anyone who’s published anything interesting has come under an attack at some point,”
says Conard.
“The smaller and more independent voices often don’t have the resources, whether technical or financial, to really put good protections in place…That’s where we come into the picture.”
Though the company hasn’t really revealed how the service works exactly, it was open enough to say that once signed up for Project Shield, a website can choose to use Google’s domain name servers instead of their own. This will then redirect visitors to an intermediate server owned by Google designed to filter out malicious traffic and cache some elements of the site to lighten the load on the website’s own servers.
The company also offers a Password Alert service for people or organizations who could be potential targets for hackers. To sign up for Project Shield, head right here and follow the instructions.
