Google will protect the media and human rights organizations from DDOS attacks

After several years of closed testing, Google has officially opened access to the DDOS attack protection service called Project Shield. This was reported in the official Google blog.

Project Shield is a kind of proxy server through which requests arriving to the site pass. With a suddenly increased load, the service determines the source of DDOS attack and filters network traffic, skipping only ordinary requests that do not threaten the performance of the resource. In addition, with an increased number of requests, the Project Shield will show a cache copy, which will also reduce the load on the protected server.

The project is primarily intended for media sites and organizations involved in human rights activities, they emphasize in Google. It is noted that often it is small portals that are unable to withstand the DDOS attack that illuminate any event, the information about which is intentionally hushed up in large media. "Free and open Internet depends on the protection of the free flow of information - starting from the news," according to Google.

Google notes that the protection provided does not affect the display of advertising or the attendance of the resource. "Since Project Shield is free, even the smallest independent news organizations will be able to continue their important work without fear that their site will be brought down," the report said.

The sites of Russian media have been repeatedly subjected to DDOS attacks. So, in June 2012, the sites of Novaya Gazeta, Echo of Moscow, the Rain television channel and Slon.ru edition were attacked . The attack involved 133 thousand infected computers. The attacks were aimed not only on the exhaustion of the resources of the media servers, but also to clogging communication channels.

The DDOS-Atak on the website of Novaya Gazeta on the eve of its twentieth anniversary, which lasted from March 31 to April 2, 2013, was unprecedented for the entire Runet. The volume of the load on the newspaper channel in peak periods reached 60 gigabits per second. These are a thousand times more than the average indicators of the "new", or 600 times more than the load on the channel of a large Russian bank with all its electronic document management.

Last May, hackers attacked Open Russia, which published the PDF file of the Putin. War report, prepared by Boris Nemtsov in cooperation with a number of other politicians and journalists. The site remained inaccessible for several hours. Then the DDOS-Atak was twice the Internet newspaper Kasparov.ru . The editorial office connected the attack with the decade of the publication.