Project Shield
Defending free speech against online threats
A free service called Project Shield protects websites pertaining to news, human rights, elections, underrepresented communities, the arts, and the sciences against DDoS attacks.
Powered by Google Cloud Armor and developed by Jigsaw and Google Cloud, Project Shield offers free, limitless defense against DDoS attacks, a kind of online assault that censors content by putting websites offline.
Project Shield’s activities
Prevent DDoS attacks on your website
Project Shield uses DDoS technologies and Google’s infrastructure to filter out harmful data. To keep your website operational in the event of a DDoS attack, its servers will block the malicious traffic.
Cut down on your traffic expenses
You can set up Project Shield to retrieve material from the servers of your website once and then offer a cached copy on subsequent requests. By doing this, possible DDoS attacks are absorbed and traffic to your servers is decreased.
Qualities
Unrestricted defense against sophisticated attacks
Google infrastructure is used by Project Shield to provide limitless protection against layer 3/4 and layer 7 assaults. Each site’s defense is automatically configured and customized.
Adaptable caching
It uses content caching to boost site performance, bolster DDoS defenses, and conserve bandwidth. When users publish updated content, they can choose to invalidate the cache.
Particular Defenses
For enhanced site security, Project Shield offers features like IP allow and deny lists and reCAPTCHA.
Site metrics in real time
With the use of Project Shield’s under-the-hood data, site traffic, mistake rates, and bandwidth savings can be quickly reviewed.
Google Project Shield
Google Cloud is announcing that Project Shield is broadening its eligibility requirements to include non-profit organizations that support the arts and sciences as well as organizations that represent underrepresented groups. DDoS is a regular component of attacks and censorship attempts that are frequently directed towards these kinds of organizations. These newly qualified enterprises can now use Project Shield to protect their websites against DDoS attacks at no cost.
The same mechanisms that safeguard Google
Google Cloud Networking and its worldwide front-end solution serve as the foundation for Project Shield. It combines the global front-end with Google Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor and is run by Google Cloud in collaboration with Jigsaw. Together, this solution and its supporting technologies can prevent assaults, cache your information, and deliver it from various locations throughout Google’s edge network.
Google’s core services, such as Gmail, Maps, and Search, are protected by the same teams and on the same infrastructure as this protection.
Every solution that makes up Project Shield is crucial to safeguarding its clients. Google Cloud Load Balancing helps improve performance and enable scalable worldwide traffic controls by serving your traffic from Google’s global network. By doing this, you may improve the speed and dependability of users connecting to your website from around the globe. It can activate extra defenses like Cloud Armor and Cloud CDN after your traffic is handled by a cloud load balancer.
No matter where the backend is located, Cloud Armor keeps your website safe and operational by reducing attack traffic at the edge of Google’s infrastructure. The same protections that safeguard its biggest enterprise clients are used by Adaptive Protection, which analyzes your traffic using machine learning to identify and stop assaults.
By using rate limits that are specifically adjusted for your website, Project Shield improves security without preventing legitimate visitors or search engines from accessing it. When malicious traffic is detected, these proactive defenses take immediate action and frequently ban attackers within the first few seconds.
Because Cloud CDN offers caching, traffic can resolve at Google’s network edge, providing your backend a respite. When millions of attackers transmit what appears to be a typical volume of bandwidth, this can help protect against broad, shallow DDoS attacks. Your website’s cacheable material can help users access it more quickly and ease the strain on your hosting servers. Caching may significantly lessen the strain on your servers and help keep your website up and running during valid surges, such when your website goes popular, or during a significant event, like election day.
Through the Google Cloud dashboard, any company may directly access these services, which can be configured and tailored to safeguard any kind of workload not just those that qualify for Project Shield. With this guidance, organizations not qualified for Project Shield can nevertheless benefit from the same Cloud Networking technologies that underpin Project Shield.
Now Protect yourself
DDoS is a serious risk that can bring down your service without any special access or compromise. Organizations from any of the Project Shield-eligible categories are encouraged to register at g.co/shield. Reviewing an application often takes a few hours, but it may take several business days. In a matter of minutes, authorized organizations can set up Project Shield protection for their websites.
