Though the company hasn’t really revealed how the service works exactly, it was open enough to say that once signed up for Project Shield, a website can choose to use Google’s domain name servers instead of their own. But now any “independent” news site (a site that isn’t sponsored by the government or a political party) can use Project Shield to help avoid DDoS attacks.
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However, the project’s early product manager, C.J. Adams was careful to assure users that Google has no plans to commercialize any data they gain from Project Shield.
Google’s new Project Shield will protect news websites, as well as those related to monitoring elections content or human rights.
DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, as you’re likely aware, involve the flooding of the victim with huge amounts of traffic from many sources that overwhelms and takes the site down.
Many privacy experts responded to Google’s announcement with skepticism because in order for websites to participate in Project Shield, they must give Google access to data on who visits their pages. It used Google’s security infrastructure to detect and filter attacks on these websites. “We do not provide service to other types of content, including gaming, businesses, or individual blogs”.
Jigsaw is one of the smaller companies that broke from Google and is now under the direct supervision of Alphabet Inc., Google’s new parent company. For those unfamiliar, Project Shield has been around for the past couple of years. This sounds a little sneaky to us, but Google said that it will keep the data for only two weeks, at which point it will be added to an aggregated pool of anonymous data for analysis about potential future attacks.
Google’s Project Zero security research team, on the other hand, has the controversial objective of exposing flaws in the software of others, such as the glibc bug that exposed thousands of Linux apps and IoT devices to hacks.
Some locations that could benefit greatly from the service won’t be able to rely on Project Shield due to worldwide sanctions.
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Google also offers a Password Alert service for people or organizations that are liable to be a target for hackers, acting like a spellcheck that watches for details being used across the Web.
