Project Shield is a free anti-distributed-denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) service that is offered by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights related content." The main goal of the project is to serve "small, under-resourced news sites that are vulnerable to the web’s growing epidemic of DDOS attacks", according to team lead George Conard. It is similar to services offered by companies like CloudFlare. Google initially announced Project Shield at their Ideas Conference on October 21, 2013. The service was initially only offered to trusted testers, but on February 25, 2016, Google opened up the service to any qualifying website. The service works by having the website use Google's IP's, and traffic is routed through a Google-owned reverse proxy that identifies and filters malicious traffic.
Project Shield provides News, Human Rights, and Elections Monitoring sites with protection from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). By a system of Caching (storing the data from the protected website to reduce load on the site). It also filters traffic to thwart DDoS Attacks. Project Shield is built on Google Cloud Services. It is provided free of charge to the qualifying websites of Independent Journalists, Human Rights, and Elections Monitoring websites to protect them regardless of their location and Project Shield as of 2016 October has users in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa.