Project Shield

Project Shield is an anti-distributed-denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) service that is offered by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google, to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights related content."^[1] The main goal of the project is to serve "small, under-resourced news sites that are vulnerable to the web's growing epidemic of DDOS attacks", according to team lead George Conard.^[2]

Google initially announced Project Shield at their Ideas Conference on October 21, 2013.^[1] The service was initially only offered to trusted testers, but on February 25, 2016, Google opened up the service to any qualifying website a Google-owned reverse proxy that identifies and filters malicious traffic.^[3] In May 2018, Jigsaw announced that it would start offering free protection from distributed denial of service attacks to US political campaigns, candidates, and political action committees.^[4]^[5]