Google has launched a new service, Project Shield, which will cache independent news websites in order to protect them from distributed denial of service attacks.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/project-shield-latest-google-product-could-protect-start-websites-hacker-ddos-attacks-1546036
Igal Zeifman, Senior Digital Strategist at Imperva, discusses whether Project Shield is enough to protect against DDoS attacks: “Project Shield is a valuable solution that highlights an important issue: the existence of cheap DDoS-for-hire services that enable anyone to launch DDoS attacks of substantial size, against any target. Google is also correct in assuming that news sites are amongst the most prominent targets for DDoS offenders.
The solution Google offers combines traffic filtering and the ability to present cached content while a website is dealing with more traffic than it can handle. This can help against certain attack vectors, but it doesn’t fully addresses the different DDoS threats that websites are facing today. For instance, it cannot mitigate network layer attacks, especially direct-to-IP attacks that target specific IP addresses and elements of a network's infrastructure. There is also the question of attack duration, as many DDoS assault can be easily sustained for days, weeks or even months at a time. For attacks like these, serving stale cached content is a hard compromise, perhaps even more so for a news organization.
In short, Project Shield can be an effective and important initiative to provide application layer protection for news organizations with no access to dedicated mitigation solutions. Depending on the duration and type of attack, however, a more targeted solution may prove beneficial.”