Google's Jigsaw Offers Free DDoS Shields to European Political Groups
Jigsaw, a cybersecurity division of Alphabet, expands its free Project Shield anti-DDoS service to European political organizations ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections. The technology protects websites from disruptive junk traffic that malicious actors use to undermine democratic processes.
Jigsaw, the cybersecurity division owned by Google parent Alphabet, expands its free anti-DDoS technology to political organizations in Europe. Previously, this protective service, known as Project Shield, remains available only to news sites, journalists, human rights organizations, and election monitors in the United States. Now, Jigsaw opens this free protection to European political campaigns ahead of highly anticipated parliamentary elections across the continent.
Project Shield defends websites against distributed denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm servers with massive amounts of junk internet traffic. The technology successfully blocks both traditional protocol-based attacks and more powerful layer 7 attacks that rely on large volumes of traffic, such as DNS amplification. By caching a website and actively filtering out harmful traffic, the system absorbs malicious requests and keeps critical sites online during an attack.
This expansion addresses a growing global threat as anti-political actors and nation-state hackers increasingly work to disrupt elections and sow discord in Europe. Recent flooding attacks successfully down critical election websites for hours in locations ranging from Tennessee to the Czech Republic. Unlike commercial providers like Cloudflare that charge for DDoS mitigation, Jigsaw provides Project Shield completely free to safeguard democratic processes from malicious disruption.