Project Shield is a free service that defends news, human rights, elections-related sites, marginalized groups, arts, and sciences from DDoS attacks.
Project Shield filters out malicious traffic using Google's infrastructure and DDoS tools. If your website is targeted by a DDoS attack, our servers will block attacking traffic to keep your website up and running.
Learn moreProject Shield can be configured to fetch content from your website's servers once and serve a cached copy on subsequent requests. This reduces traffic to your servers and absorbs potential DDoS attacks.
Project Shield uses Google infrastructure to protect you without limits, including for layer 3/4 and layer 7 attacks. This defense is automatically configured and tailored for each site.
Project Shield caches content to strengthen DDoS defenses, improve site performance, and save bandwidth to sites. Users have the ability to invalidate the cache when they publish updated content.
Project Shield provides controls such as reCAPTCHA and IP allow and deny lists for increased site protection.
Project Shield provides under-the-hood metrics, allowing for a quick review of site traffic, error rates, and bandwidth savings.
For the past decade, dozens of media and human rights groups working with Qurium Media Foundation have received anti denial of service protection from Jigsaw and Project Shield.
Since our first contact with Jigsaw back in 2014, we have the peace of mind that we have a scalable infrastructure capable of handling the most complex denial of service attacks at our disposal. Knowing that Shield can mitigate attacks of enormous size and complexity has helped us to prioritize our technical and human resources in investigating and finding those that threaten our hosted organizations.
Since day one, we felt that the team at Shield shared our mission of ensuring that those that investigate human rights violations can not be silenced.
It has been a decade and during all this time the Shield team has been always receptive to our feedback. During this time we have fought the Great Cannon botnet in 2015, massive IoT botnets as Mirai in 2016, hundreds of stress testing services used to launch flooding attacks and the new emerging threat coming from the abuse of residential proxies.
The service provided by Shield offers us fantastic mitigation capabilities when attacks take place, and most importantly discourages future denial of service attempts.
Qurium Media Foundation is a non-for-profit organization based in Sweden that provides security and safety services to hundreds of media projects worldwide since 2009. Qurium has been using Google Shield since it was an early beta tester in February 2014. This close collaboration enabled us to go far, together. Thanks.
It took 30 minutes for the initial setup, followed by some optimizations over the next two days, and since then we've simply left it to run without issues.
A wonderful case of 'install and forget.' We've suffered no more attacks since, and as an extra bonus the load on our server has approximately halved.
Project Shield has enabled us and Kieskompas to assist over 2 million people with voting advice in the last Dutch elections!
Without this project, we would have had a hard time staying up and running. Now, we can keep focusing on our primary objective without spending too much time on hardening our infrastructure against DDoS attacks.
Our cooperation with Project Shield began at the turn of 2013, during very dramatic times in the history of Ukraine (the Revolution of Dignity). At that time, large businessmen in Ukraine owned most of the newspapers and TV channels, and introduced the strictest censorship in their media. The only news sources that were not under their control were independent internet sites, and among them was Ukrainska Pravda.
We faced two challenges - the growth of legitimate user traffic (peaking over 100x our normal), as well as daily DDoS attacks, which became a big problem for us. When we were offered protection from Project Shield, it was a great relief for us. We were able to focus on developing the site and not think about cyber threats anymore.
Protection from Project Shield played an equally important role for us in February 2022. One of the important components of the attack on Ukraine was a total cyber attack, disabling communications (television and internet) to cause panic among the population. Without Ukrainian media, the only source of information would be Russian-controlled sources of fakes and disinformation.
Thanks to Project Shield, Ukrainskaya Pravda remained online once again and continued to work despite all attempts to collapse our servers. We want to express our gratitude to the entire Project Shield and Jigsaw teams - you are doing good work and doing it very well.
Project Shield protects service operations from external threats such as DDoS, and directly contributes to reducing line costs. Acrofan has successfully defended itself against a variety of threats thanks to the solid support of Project Shield. Project Shield provides enormous benefit for journalists (and has been a great help to me), and the strength of its protection has been proven repeatedly through the years.
I believe that the capabilities of Project Shield greatly contribute to the realization and spread of true democracy.
Project Shield is the cornerstone of BehindMLM's defense against digital attacks. As a publication that researches and reports on financial fraud, BehindMLM is frequently targeted by bad actors. For almost a decade Shield has kept BehindMLM online, allowing us to keep consumers informed.
After initial setup and optimization, for which detailed tutorials and prompt support is available, Shield for the most part is a "set and forget" solution. For diagnostics or a more hands-on approach, additional stats and manual mitigation tools are provided. Global CDN caching is also available, reducing the load on our web server.
Highly recommended for qualifying organizations looking for enterprise grade protection against digital attacks.
Integrating Project Shield into our infrastructure took us only 30 minutes, followed by a couple of days of fine-tuning to meet our specific needs. Impressively, once configured, the system required no further intervention, truly living up to its 'install and forget' reputation.
Our servers have experienced a significant reduction in load, likely due to Shield's effective mitigation of unwanted traffic. Furthermore, we haven't faced any subsequent attacks, allowing us to redirect our focus toward our core operations without the constant worry of DDoS threats looming over us.
Our almost 8-year collaboration with Jigsaw and Project Shield has been marked by a consistent and reliable defense against DDoS attacks. Since we first partnered with Shield in 2016, we've enjoyed the reassurance that our infrastructure can withstand even the most sophisticated attacks. This peace of mind has allowed us to invest more time and resources into projects and objectives that matter most to us, without the fear of malicious disruptions.
At Facilisimo.com, the ability to maintain our digital presence without interruptions has been crucial. The support and reliability that Project Shield has provided us over the years exemplify true partnership. The team at Jigsaw has always been responsive and supportive, ensuring that Shield continues to meet our evolving needs.
In conclusion, our experience with Project Shield has been exceptional. It continues to provide us with unprecedented security and performance, allowing us to confidently navigate an increasingly complex digital landscape. We highly recommend Project Shield to any organization looking to safeguard its online presence with a dependable, efficient, and hassle-free solution.
I used to spend a lot of time checking to see why my site was down, or who was attacking me. That's because for better or worse my website -- krebsonsecurity.com -- has long been used by the cybercrime underground as the Internet's version of Alderan: Every time someone had a new weapon to try out, they would invariably test it against my little site. Before Project Shield stepped forward in 2016, one of the largest botnets the world had ever seen kept my site offline for days. Project Shield helps me rise above all of that needless drama, and keep my focus on investigations and scoops. Plus, on the rare occasions I do hear from Shield about DDoS attacks on my site, it's usually something interesting.
Enter the domain that you want to protect with Project Shield.
Project Shield gathers information about your website from DNS records, to help you configure your protection quickly.
Check that Project Shield's proposed configuration is correct for your website. This includes the hostnames you serve on your website, and the hostname or IP address of the origin server where you publish your content.
Project Shield will configure protections for your site.
Turn on Project Shield protection by changing your DNS A records to send traffic to our servers. You may need to create a DNS CNAME record first, to set up certificates.
Google Cloud Networking offers planet-scale networking for a smart and connected world. This includes Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor, which together provide the primary protections on Project Shield.
Jigsaw is a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies, and builds technology that inspires scalable solutions. We forecast emerging threats and explore how technology can protect individuals and societies.
Google's Advanced Protection Program safeguards users with high visibility and sensitive information from targeted online attacks. New protections are automatically added to defend against today’s wide range of threats.
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Protecting participation in the global internet
Outline is an open-source project created by Jigsaw that provides a way for individuals and organizations to access the open internet. Outline's advanced networking strategies protect media apps and VPN tools against network-level interference.
Intra is an open source project created by Jigsaw that gives you safer, more open internet access. Intra protects you from DNS manipulation, a cyber attack used to block access to news sites, social media platforms and messaging apps.