After years of being exclusively available to news sites, human rights sites and election monitoring sites in the United States of America, search engine giant, Google, is offering political organisations cyber-security by signing up for its anti-web flooding technology, ‘Project Shield.’
Designed and run by Jigsaw, the cyber-security division of the search engine’s parent company Alphabet Inc, Project Shield protects websites from Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks which is a technique employed by hackers where websites are flooded with a large number of fake visitors, overpowering the website’s server, knocking it offline and making it unavailable to those who need it.
The goal of the service is to ensure that external parties are unable to take down websites with valuable information about the elections. This cuts across news publications, government agencies, Non governmental observers, etc. The service defends against these attacks by caching the website, which helps the anti-DDSoS technology identify and absorb unnecessary traffic from malicious sources, which it filters and rejects, to keep the site running.
The timing of the arrival of Project Shield seems apt, especially for the European Union, as it embarks on what is set to be a hotly contested European Parliament Elections, scheduled for May this year.
Following the controversial exit of the United Kingdom, the EU will be watched meticulously as it makes a move to reshape itself. Coupled with the threat of anti-political actors and nation-state hackers who have attempted to disrupt elections using the DDoS over the years, with the most recent cases recorded in Czech Republic in 2017 and Tennessee, the availability of the service to election stakeholders calms an already existing sense of urgency.
Announcing the new development and the motivation behind it, Scott Carpenter, the Director of Policy and International Engagement at Jigsaw, said: “Cyber-attacks against democratic institutions are on the rise and have steadily increased in intensity over the past few years,”
“With citizens across Europe heading to the polls in May, defending these organisations from digital attacks has become a pressing concern.”
“Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Project Shield to European political organisations, extending free protection to campaigns and candidates ahead of the EU parliamentary elections in May 2019.”
The upcoming elections in May, will see over 350 million voters decide which candidates are fit enough to occupy each of the 705 seats available in the EU parliament.
