Google’s Project Shield restores net security expert Brian Krebs’ site after massive DDoS attack

Google's Project Shield, a little-known but important service offered by Google, shot into the limelight recently after a massive attack on the web site of cyber security journalist Brian Krebs.

The website, Krebsonsecurity.com was hit with 620 Gb of traffic per second, an "extremely large and unusual" attack that flooded the site with page-view requests, knocking it offline.

In what is known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, hackers had orchestrated hordes of connected gadgets like digital video recorders, routers and digital cameras into a botnet, which overwhelmed Krebs' website.

The attack forced Prolexic, a DDoS protection service that was protecting his site, to pull its services and Akamai Technologies removed his site from its network. The attack was much too overwhelming and costing too much money.

At this point, Google's Project Shield stepped in to offer protection and the website was up again on Sunday.

In a new post Krebs wrote that he felt like DDoS attacks were being used as a form of censorship to curb the spread of information.

Project Shield is a free-speech protection tool offered by Jigsaw, which was earlier known as  as Google Ideas, the New-York-based think tank. Google changed the name in February after its restructuring to become Alphabet.

The goal of Jigsaw, according to its website is to use technology to "make people in the world safer," taking on issues like censorship, corruption and extremism.

DDoS attacks had only grown since, and on Thursday, internet service provider OVH Hosting said it was hit with more than 1 terabit per second of traffic, a record, according to some, from a botnet comprising 145,607 cameras and DVRs.

And, if the unprecedented scale of was not worrying enough, security experts expressed more concern with the source - not infected PCs, but internet of things (IOT) devices like cameras and routers.

The attack seemed to be only a warm up exercise of sorts as the assaults intensified and peaked at over a terabit of data per second, with concerns that the botnet had the potential to escalate 50 per cent data if the timing was right.