Security News > 2023 > March > With political ‘hacktivism’ rising, Google offers Project Shield to fight DDoS attacks

A microcosm of this upward trend involved exploits targeting public information sites and tied to political events, including the war in Ukraine and the midterm elections in the U.S. In response to the rise in politically motivated DDoS attacks, Google is offering a free service called Project Shield to government sites, news and independent journalists, sites related to elections and voting, and sites that cover human rights.

The company reported a 400% rise in DDoS attacks on its customers during last year's election season in the U.S. In the second half of 2022, Project Shield saw over 25,000 such attacks against customers, many of them 100,000 queries per second in size.

According to Google, to detect, deflect and mitigate attacks, Project Shield comprises the Google Cloud Armor network security system - which includes such features as an ML mechanism to detect and block application layer DDoS attacks, and bot management at the cloud edge.

Google says Project Shield stops almost all DDoS attacks.

Google Cloud claims 95% efficacy of Project Shield in defending against DDoS attacks.

"In 2023, the democratization of DDoS and patriotic hacktivism will continue to drive an increase in smaller, more frequent attacks - a trend we are already seeing in the increased frequency of lower volume attacks in. At the same time, expect the cybercrime underground to become even better organized and funded in its pursuit of hard-hitting attacks," said Google Cloud in a statement released Monday.

News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-launches-project-shield/