As the midterm elections near, America is bracing itself for another barrage of cyberattacks, following the alleged Russian onslaught across Democratic and Republican organizations in the lead up to the 2016 presidential race. From one perspective, Alphabet's Jigsaw unit is here to help. It's announcing Wednesday that any official, registered political organization can get free protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using the same infrastructure that powers Google services.
DDoS attempts flood target web servers with traffic. One way to prevent them causing damage is to put a shield up that looks at traffic coming in and, if the connections are malicious, will either block them or spread the incoming data deluge across different servers. Jigsaw, now under Google owner Alphabet, does its own version of that with its Project Shield service, which has long been provided to journalists, activists and electoral bodies.
Jigsaw will now be extending that to any organization that has been registered as a political organization in the U.S. and has been careful to ensure it'll provide the Shield regardless of how extreme the potential customer. That includes campaigns, candidates and PACs in the U.S.. It'll also be open to global political organizations.
All will have to comply with the Jigsaw content and conduct policy, however. Alongside criminal activity and promotion of such behavior, it outlaws hate speech. According to the policy's definition, hate speech covers anything "that promotes or condones violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity, or whose primary purpose is inciting hatred on the basis of these core characteristics. This can be a delicate balancing act, but if the primary purpose is to attack a protected group, the content crosses the line."
George Conard, product manager at Project Shield, told Forbes the project has dealt with concerns over protecting potentially controversial sites in the past, when providing protection to news outlets. "There were a lot of journalists from different parts of the political spectrum," he noted, adding that Jigsaw still promised to provide the Shield as long as the above policy wasn't broken. "We think it's really important to protect democracy."
Protect your election
The move forms part of the Alphabet Protect Your Election initiative, set up with the aim of securing election monitoring sites, news organizations and individual journalists around a vote. "We thought with the cycle coming up in the U.S. it's time to expand our scope to protect," Conard added.
Another reason for the expanded protection was a rise in DDoS attacks. "We've seen an uptick in DDoS - it's cheap, it's easy, you don't have to be technical," said Conard.
A recent law enforcement action showed the scale of the DDoS problem. In an effort across the U.S. and Europe, police took down the biggest DDoS-for-hire website, WebStresser.org, in April. The site gave anyone the chance to launch a DDoS for a small fee. As many as 6 million attacks were launched via the service, according to Dutch police.
Whilst DDoS sites didn't cause any significant problems during the 2016 presidential race (at least compared with the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton's campaign staff), a warning sign came earlier this month of what could be to come when the midterms land in November. As the end of the Knox County, Tenessee, mayoral primaries loomed, the site set up to provide results was taken offline by a DDoS, or what officials called "extremely heavy and abnormal network traffic."
