#ddosattacks

Defending free speech against online threats

A free service called Project Shield protects websites pertaining to news, human rights, elections, underrepresented communities, the arts, and the sciences against DDoS attacks.

Powered by Google Cloud Armor and developed by Jigsaw and Google Cloud, Project Shield offers free, limitless defense against DDoS attacks, a kind of online assault that censors content by putting websites offline.

Project Shield’s activities

Prevent DDoS attacks on your website

Project Shield uses DDoS technologies and Google’s infrastructure to filter out harmful data. To keep your website operational in the event of a DDoS attack, its servers will block the malicious traffic.

Cut down on your traffic expenses

You can set up Project Shield to retrieve material from the servers of your website once and then offer a cached copy on subsequent requests. By doing this, possible DDoS attacks are absorbed and traffic to your servers is decreased.

Qualities

Unrestricted defense against sophisticated attacks

Google infrastructure is used by Project Shield to provide limitless protection against layer 3/4 and layer 7 assaults. Each site’s defense is automatically configured and customized.

Adaptable caching

It uses content caching to boost site performance, bolster DDoS defenses, and conserve bandwidth. When users publish updated content, they can choose to invalidate the cache.

Particular Defenses

For enhanced site security, Project Shield offers features like IP allow and deny lists and reCAPTCHA.

Site metrics in real time

With the use of Project Shield’s under-the-hood data, site traffic, mistake rates, and bandwidth savings can be quickly reviewed.

Google Project Shield

Google Cloud is announcing that Project Shield is broadening its eligibility requirements to include non-profit organizations that support the arts and sciences as well as organizations that represent underrepresented groups. DDoS is a regular component of attacks and censorship attempts that are frequently directed towards these kinds of organizations. These newly qualified enterprises can now use Project Shield to protect their websites against DDoS attacks at no cost.

The same mechanisms that safeguard Google

Google Cloud Networking and its worldwide front-end solution serve as the foundation for Project Shield. It combines the global front-end with Google Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor and is run by Google Cloud in collaboration with Jigsaw. Together, this solution and its supporting technologies can prevent assaults, cache your information, and deliver it from various locations throughout Google’s edge network.

Google’s core services, such as Gmail, Maps, and Search, are protected by the same teams and on the same infrastructure as this protection.

Every solution that makes up Project Shield is crucial to safeguarding its clients. Google Cloud Load Balancing helps improve performance and enable scalable worldwide traffic controls by serving your traffic from Google’s global network. By doing this, you may improve the speed and dependability of users connecting to your website from around the globe. It can activate extra defenses like Cloud Armor and Cloud CDN after your traffic is handled by a cloud load balancer.

No matter where the backend is located, Cloud Armor keeps your website safe and operational by reducing attack traffic at the edge of Google’s infrastructure. The same protections that safeguard its biggest enterprise clients are used by Adaptive Protection, which analyzes your traffic using machine learning to identify and stop assaults.

By using rate limits that are specifically adjusted for your website, Project Shield improves security without preventing legitimate visitors or search engines from accessing it. When malicious traffic is detected, these proactive defenses take immediate action and frequently ban attackers within the first few seconds.

Because Cloud CDN offers caching, traffic can resolve at Google’s network edge, providing your backend a respite. When millions of attackers transmit what appears to be a typical volume of bandwidth, this can help protect against broad, shallow DDoS attacks. Your website’s cacheable material can help users access it more quickly and ease the strain on your hosting servers. Caching may significantly lessen the strain on your servers and help keep your website up and running during valid surges, such when your website goes popular, or during a significant event, like election day.

Through the Google Cloud dashboard, any company may directly access these services, which can be configured and tailored to safeguard any kind of workload not just those that qualify for Project Shield. With this guidance, organizations not qualified for Project Shield can nevertheless benefit from the same Cloud Networking technologies that underpin Project Shield.

Now Protect yourself

DDoS is a serious risk that can bring down your service without any special access or compromise. Organizations from any of the Project Shield-eligible categories are encouraged to register at g.co/shield. Reviewing an application often takes a few hours, but it may take several business days. In a matter of minutes, authorized organizations can set up Project Shield protection for their websites.

Assist in defending your websites and apps against online threats and denial of service attacks.

Google Cloud Armor Advantages

Integrated DDoS protection

Google’s experience safeguarding important web properties like YouTube, Gmail, and Google Search is beneficial to Cloud Armor. It offers integrated defenses against DDoS assaults at the L3 and L4 levels.

Reduce the OWASP Top 10 hazards

Pre-established rules offered by Cloud Armor aid in the defense against assaults like SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS).

Protection fit for an enterprise

You may get curated rule sets, DDoS and WAF services, and other services for a fixed monthly fee with the Cloud Armor Enterprise tier.

Important characteristics

Adaptive defense

Use a machine learning system that has been locally trained on your apps to automatically identify and assist in mitigating big volume Layer 7 DDoS attacks.

Sophisticated DDoS defense for networks

Using external network load balancers, protocol forwarding, and virtual machines (VMs) with public IP addresses, workloads can be protected against volumetric network and protocol DDoS attacks with always-on attack monitoring and mitigation.

Pre-set WAF regulations

OWASP Top 10 protection and mitigation against common web-application vulnerabilities are provided by out-of-the-box rules based on industry standards.

Bot oversight

Offers your apps automated bot protection and aids in preventing fraud at the source and on the edge by natively integrating with reCAPTCHA Enterprise.

Limiting rates

Rate-based restrictions assist you in safeguarding your applications from a high volume of requests that overburden your instances and prevent authorized users from accessing them.

Cloud Armor pricing

Google Cloud Armor cost depending on application traffic and protection. Overview of typical cost structure:

Secure Policies:

Monthly security policies cost $5.

Traffic filtering policies are created and maintained here.

Security Policy Rules:

Monthly $1 per rule.

Charges per rule apply to policies with several rules.

HTTP(S) Request Fees:

$0.75 per million Cloud Armor-evaluated HTTP(S) requests.

Cloud Armor-filtered traffic incurs this fee.

Protection Adaptation:

One protected resource per hour costs $0.10.

This applies to automatic DDoS mitigation using Adaptive Protection.

DDoS Protection Costs:

Applications using the baseline Cloud Armor service receive free DDoS protection, although premium protection levels may cost extra.

Premium Features:

Depending on your use case, sophisticated security features like logging may cost more.

Check Google Cloud’s pricing calculator or documentation for current pricing based on your needs. Pricing varies by area and feature.

GCP Cloud Armor

As a world leader in digital interactive entertainment, Electronic Arts (EA) is renowned for its cutting-edge games, cutting-edge services, and potent technology. To safeguard its game servers and improve DDoS resistance, EA Sports FC, a major gaming brand, chose Google Cloud Armor to host its gaming infrastructure.

Gaming companies might suffer greatly from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. They may interfere with player access to games, disrupt gameplay, or even harm game servers. This may result in decreased sales, unhappy clients, and damage to the business’s reputation.

The gaming industry was a primary target of the massive growth in volume and frequency of DDoS assaults over the past year. As per the Gcore Radar report for the second half of 2023, 46% of the attacks target the gaming industry, making it the most affected sector.

Armor Cloud hosting

Protecting against DDoS using Google Cloud Armor

At the periphery of Google’s Cross-Cloud Network is a web-application firewall and DDoS mitigation service called Cloud Armor. Applications and services that are installed on Google Cloud, on-site, or with another infrastructure provider are safeguarded by Cloud Armor.

With a focus on the gaming sector, Cloud Armor has been able to meet the specific requirements of L4 workloads like UDP by adding new products to its portfolio in the last year. Both GKE and GCE workloads are supported by the underlying networking infrastructure, which can be either virtual machines (VMs) with public IP addresses or an External Passthrough Load Balancer.

EA Sports uses our new custom network edge security rules in conjunction with enhanced network DDoS protection as a subscriber of Cloud Armor Enterprise. In order to fight against common volumetric network and protocol DDoS attacks, such as SYN flood, UDP flood, DNS reflection, and NTP amplification attacks, advanced network DDoS defense offers always-on attack detection and just-in-time mitigation.

Customers can design a set of security rules to permit or prohibit traffic at the network’s edge based on user-specified filters, including IP addresses, ASNs, ports, regions, and protocols, using Cloud Armor custom network edge security policies. Customers can match each security policy to the particular service they want to safeguard by attaching it to one or more backend services or virtual machines (VMs).

Additionally, deep packet inspection is carried out by Google Cloud Armor on incoming traffic to stop policy-violating activity. Clients can set up a security policy rule that, when combined with other filters, examines each incoming packet based on a user-specified TCP/UDP byte offset location filter.

Every incoming packet is assessed and subject to Cloud Armor security regulations at Google Cloud’s network edge, much upstream of client equipment. Our network’s size and reach enable Google Cloud to securely absorb and disperse massive attacks with the least amount of disruption to client infrastructure.

Together with additional clients and the EA Product Infrastructure and Engineering division, these new bespoke network edge security policies were created. The Cloud Armor team tested and refined the proposed service during the development period. The end product is a strong tool that enables EA Sports FC to enhance their DDoS protection and design security policies that are specific to their requirements.

Study up on Cloud Armor

A useful tool for defending game servers against DDoS attacks is Cloud Armor. It can ensure that gamers can keep having fun with their games while lessening the impact of attacks.