infoTECH Feature

October 22, 2013

Google Has Technology to Protect against DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a continuing concern, especially for websites in nations where the government controls the Internet.

The number of DDoS attacks increased during the first quarter of 2013. In fact, the number of DDOS attacks in Q1 2013 edged up by 1.75 percent compared to Q4 of 2012. They jumped 21.75 percent when comparing the first quarters of 2013 and 2012, according to a Prolexic study.

Also, Indonesia and China are the source of most of these overall DDoS attacks – with the two nations making up more than half of attack traffic. The United States comes in third place as a source.

In response to these kinds of continual concerns, Google (News - Alert) has come up with Project Shield. It employs Google’s technology to protect websites vulnerable to DDoS attacks.

It is targeted particularly to help online activists who may oppose the government in such nations as Syria or Egypt. The Internet in these nations is under government control -- unlike the United States.

Some of the activists' websites there play a key role for civilians. For instance, in Syria there is a website called “Aymta,” which lets the population know if a scud missile was launched and where it may land. The Syrian government shut down the website in July through a DDoS attack.

"There are so many organizations that need this sort of protection," Scott Carpenter, deputy director of Google Ideas, said in an interview with Mashable. "And they are very small, they are very easy to knock offline."

DDoS attacks work by shutting down a website by a continuing number of malicious attacks. But Project Shield uses Google's anti-DDoS technology and the Page Speed Service, which lets websites provide content via Google. Forbes reported how Google’s Page Speed Service lets Google host and serve at-risk websites. Also, Google’s internal DDOS mitigation technology has large server capacity and can filter data in searches for malicious traffic.

"DDoS attacks allow anyone to purchase someone else's silence," C.J. Adams, an associate at the Google Ideas think tank, said in a recent statement reported by Mashable. "That hurts the Internet and it hurts free expression online."

As of now, Project Shield is available only through invitation. Human rights organizations, elections-related groups, and news websites in regions where there is military conflict are being asked to test Project Shield. They can use technology for free now, though Google could charge a fee later.

Project Shield was already tested by Balatarin, a social and political blog in Persian, and the Aymta website, according to a Google statement. It was used, too, when protecting an election monitoring service in Kenya.

“The thing that can take many of these sites offline is so small to us. We can absorb it,” Adams was quoted by Forbes. “That’s made this something we can provide fairly easily…It has a huge impact for them, and we can take the hit.”




Edited by Ryan Sartor
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