From time to time, websites get hacked. One of the favorite and effective ways to take a site down would be through a DDoS attack. This basically involves flooding the site with so many requests till the point where it can’t handle it and shuts down, at least temporarily until it gets rebooted and things are up and running again.
The good news is that if you run a news website, like ours for example, you will be pleased to learn that Google has opened up Project Shield to include more websites under its protection. For those unfamiliar, Project Shield has been around for the past couple of years. However back then, about 100 sites were under its protection and they were websites that wrote topics like human rights, election monitoring, political news, and etc. Essentially websites that would generate a lot of debate, in which some visitors might express their views by trying to take sites down that did not agree with them.
However Google has decided to expand its offering to cover more websites, even the smaller guys. Speaking to WIRED, Project Shield leader George Conard said, “Just about anyone who’s published anything interesting has come under an attack at some point. The smaller and more independent voices often don’t have the resources, whether technical or financial, to really put good protections in place…That’s where we come into the picture.”
The best part is that Project Shield will be free to use. Google claims that this is part of the company’s overall mission which is to serve people with information when they want it. So far the pilot program has yielded a fair bit of success, so if you are a site owner who thinks that they might be able to qualify for Project Shield’s protection, hit up its website for the details.