How ‘Project Shield’ can help you against DDOS attacks online
We know it’s no fake news to hear that the world’s humanitarian, news and information websites are under attack at a higher rate than ever.
61% of large UK businesses and 52% of high-income UK charities identified cyber security breaches/attack during 2018.
Usually politically motivated, hackers use a ‘DDoS’ attack method to overload the visitors to the site and inevitably, create a crash so that no one can access the site or the information that they publish.
Google’s ‘Project Shield’ software is freely available software that can monitor the traffic to a website for any unusual overload activity to protect the site.
What are these attacks?
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service: a type of cyberattack that tries to make a website or network resource unavailable. The attacker coordinates the use of hundreds or sometimes even thousands of devices across the internet to send an overwhelming amount of unwanted traffic to the company’s website or network in hope to prevent access to the site from legitimate users.
An attack can cause downtime for minutes, hours or days — and prevent potential customers users from buying products, using a service, or getting information from the target.
Google has created the ‘Project Shield’ software, with Jigsaw, to come up with a solution to this problem to prevent these attacks from taking place. It’s quick and easy to set up, a wonderful case of “install and forget”.
What is Project Shield?
Project Shield servers receive traffic requests on your website’s behalf, then sends only the safe traffic through to your website’s server. This protects your site against the disruption caused through Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in two ways:
- It filters harmful traffic. Project Shield filters out potentially disruptive or harmful traffic using Google’s technology tools. If someone tries to take your website down with this kind of attack, Project Shield can identify and block the incoming traffic so your website stays up and running.
- It absorbs traffic through caching. Project Shield can save a version of your content for website visitors. This reduces traffic requests to your website server and absorbs potential DDoS attacks.
In short, Project Shield is a reverse proxy that filters through the possible overload of visitors to a site and blocks the harmful traffic that could be trying to access the website.
