Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks remain a major cause of concern for many website owners and developers, especially smaller sites without the resources to protect against them. DDoS events are when websites are ‘attacked’ with a huge amount of traffic. This can either significantly slow down or even shut down the site entirely.

Google’s Ideas branch has announced they’re developing tools, currently dubbed Project Shield, in order to help defend smaller networks against this sort of malicious traffic. The project is an adaptation of Google’s own powerful DDoS mitigation tools. Project Shield is currently being made available to testers.

At the moment, Google is focusing on making the Shield tools available to the likes of independent media sites and blogs, especially those in territories where oppositional voices are often silenced through methods like DDoS attacks. Early tests will also give preference to sites containing information on elections and human rights.

The project is explained in more detail in the video below, including testimonies from operators of sites in Iran and Syria that were frequently subjected to attacks.

The map below has also been released to illustrate the geographical spread of large-scale digital attacks. Based on data from software company Arbour Networks, it is inevitably incomplete, and many hackers will ‘mask’ the true origins of the traffic (an American DDoS attack, for example, could well be re-routed through Chinese networks and computers). However, it does help visualise the scale and severity of the attack attempts.

Google explains “applying the power of data visualization to this information can enable a greater understanding of the underlying mechanics of these networks, which in turn can lead to much more targeted and effective efforts to counter them”.