For about an hour on the night of a primary election in May, residents in Knox County, Tennessee, couldn’t tell who was winning. Hackers had taken down the county’s election tracking website, crashing the page at 8 p.m., right as polls were closing. The county’s IT director, Dick Moran, said the website had seen “extremely heavy and abnormal network traffic.” Its mayor called for an investigation into the cyberattack. The incident showed all the signs of a distributed denial-of-service attack — when attackers flood a website’s servers with traffic until they can’t handle the incoming requests and crash. And it was just the kind of thing that Jigsaw, a tech incubator owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, wants to prevent. The company is already expecting even more DDoS attacks as Election Day in the US, on Nov. 6, draws closer. “We have seen that attacks spike in election cycles in different parts of the world,” said George Conard, a product manager for Jigsaw’s Project Shield.
On Wednesday, Jigsaw announced that Project Shield, its free DDoS protection tool, would be available to political campaigns, candidates and political action committees. In the past, the tool — which protects websites from attacks by filtering the flood of traffic — had been available only for journalists, human rights advocates and, since last March, election monitors and human rights groups.
Jigsaw had seen hackers take down websites for election monitoring in Mexico, France, South Korea and the Netherlands, and hoped to prevent future DDoS attacks. Conard said that political parties, campaigns and organizations are a growing target for cyberattacks during election cycles. And Project Shield won’t be just available to major political organizations — it’ll be available to protect local elections as well.
Full Article: Google rolls out free cyberattack shield for elections and campaigns – CNET.