Project Shield, a free anti-distributed denial of service prevention tool offered by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc is all set to defend election campaigns and related events from cyber attacks of all range.
Jigsaw is offering the tool as a free software to political parties, candidates and political action committees along with governments who are monitoring them. The tool protects websites from attacks by filtering the web traffic and mitigating the risks associated with Denial of service attacks.
The free Anti-DDoS attack monitoring tool has been in operation since the end of 2015 and has safeguarded about 700 websites from the said threats.
For instance, Jigsaw Project Shield helped in protecting the website of security journalist Brian Krebs from being attacked by Mirai Botnet which captured more than 600,000 IoT devices like routers and resulted in data loss of more than 20 Gbps.
The focus comes after most of the US government heads expressed their concern over the looming cyber threats on midterm elections.
As DDoS attacks are available on lease on the web for as low as $20, tools to contain such attacks becomes a necessity.
Project Shield helps in protecting news, human rights and election monitoring sites from Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) attacks. As it is built on Google Cloud Services platform, web users find it reliable and most importantly find it efficient in isolating their websites from being targeted with unusual traffic burst.
Note 1- Google initially announced the idea of Project Shield at Ideas Conference on October 21, 2013. Initially, the service was offered to trusted testers and then was rolled out on an official note on Feb 25, 2016.
Note 2– Jigsaw claims that its service is being utilized by users from Europe, Africa, Asia, North America as of now.
