Google to help news sites against cyber attacks

Google today launched a new set of “free expression” tools, offering its own sophisticated defences, to help shield news portals and human rights groups from cyber attacks.

The new package of services, including one called ‘Project Shield’, was unveiled today at the Google Ideas Summit in New York.

“As long as people have expressed ideas, others have tried to silence them. Today one out of every three people lives in a society that is severely censored,” wrote Google Ideas director Jared Cohen in the internet giant’s official blog.

Online barriers, said Cohen, include everything from filters that block content to targeted attacks designed to take down websites.

“For many people, these obstacles are more than an inconvenience—they represent full-scale repression,” he said.

Cohen explained that Project Shield is an initiative that enables people to use Google’s technology to better protect websites that might otherwise have been taken offline by “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks.

Google Malaysia’s Zeffri Yusof, when contacted, said ‘Project Shield’ welcomed websites—“especially those covering independent news, human rights and election related content” — to apply itself to be under the Project Shield programme.

The programme is currently free but is on an invite-only basis, though webmasters can now join to be in Google’s next round of ‘trusted testers’.

Aside from Project Shield, the Digital Attack Map is a live data visualization, built through a collaboration between Arbor Networks and Google Ideas, that maps DDoS attacks designed to take down websites—and their content—around the globe.

“This tool shows real-time anonymous traffic data related to these attacks on free speech, and also lets people explore historic trends and see related news reports of outages happening on a given day,” said Cohen.

uProxy is a new browser extension under development that lets friends provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web, helping protect an Internet connection from filtering, surveillance or misdirection.

The Google Ideas Summit, is entitled “Conflict in a Connected World”, where “hacktivists,” security experts, entrepreneurs, dissidents and others come together “to explore the changing nature of conflict and how online tools and can both harm and protect.”