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Project Shield is a free service providing protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. This service 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]
In January 2019, Google's Jigsaw expanded Project Shield to offer free DDoS protection to political organizations and websites in Europe, ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections.[6]