DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are a particular type of cyberattack involving botnets that repeatedly bombard a website until it crashes under the sheer amount of traffic. Although any website can be targeted for a DDoS attack, news sites can be marked for censorship purposes and Google’s Project Shield is a service offering to prevent this.

All sites serving news, human rights information, or election monitoring information can apply for this service for free. It works as a reverse proxy: Project Shield intercepts traffic requests to your site and sends on the safe visitors while kicking the botnets to the kerb.

For those wondering what Google gets out of this, the company makes it clear that it will not store client data or serve ads alongside their content, however, its caching features may result in a slower (or faster) loading website.

[ https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/Opens in new window ]