Google to protect election websites, individuals against cyberattacks

Google has announced that it will be providing extra protection against cyberattacks or online threats to at-risk organizations and individuals during the upcoming 2022 Philippine elections.

Google is inviting Philippine human rights, elections monitoring, and media organizations as well as individual journalists to apply to Project Shield.

Project Shield, created by Jigsaw and Google, provides free unlimited protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, a type of digital attack used to censor information by taking websites offline. According to Google, Project Shield filters out malicious traffic using Google’s infrastructure and DDoS tools. If a website is targeted by a DDoS attack, Google’s servers will block attacking traffic to keep the website up and running.

Moreover, Google’s Advanced Protection Program (APP) is designed to help protect policy makers, candidates, campaign teams, journalists, and activists from cyberattacks.

Ahead of the elections, Google is offering to enroll these individuals into APP in order for them to be protected against a wide variety of online threats, including sophisticated phishing attacks, malware and other malicious downloads on Chrome and Android, and unauthorized access to their personal account data (such as Gmail, Drive or Photos). In addition, APP brings Google’s strongest security protections together into a holistic program that is constantly upgraded in response to emerging threats.