Project Shield is an anti-distributed-denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) service that is offered by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google, to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights related content." [1] 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. [2]
Google initially announced Project Shield at their Ideas Conference on October 21, 2013. [1] The service was initially only offered to trusted testers, but on February 25, 2016, Google opened up the service to any qualifying website a Google-owned reverse proxy that identifies and filters malicious traffic. [3] In May 2018, Jigsaw announced that it would start offering free protection from distributed denial of service attacks to US political campaigns, candidates, and political action committees. [4] [5]
In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
mydoom also known as, my.doom, W32.MyDoom@mm, Novarg, Mimail.R, Shimgapi, W32/Mydoom@MM, WORM_MYDOOM, Win32.Mydoom is a computer worm affecting Microsoft Windows. It was first sighted on January 26, 2004. It became the fastest-spreading e-mail worm ever, exceeding previous records set by the Sobig worm and ILOVEYOU, a record which as of 2023 has yet to be surpassed.
The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to track email spammers and spam-related activity. The name spamhaus, a pseudo-German expression, was coined by Linford to refer to an internet service provider, or other firm, which spams or knowingly provides service to spammers.
The Storm botnet or Storm worm botnet was a remotely controlled network of "zombie" computers that had been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam. At its height in September 2007, the Storm botnet was running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems, and accounted for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers. It was first identified around January 2007, having been distributed by email with subjects such as "230 dead as storm batters Europe," giving it its well-known name. The botnet began to decline in late 2007, and by mid-2008 had been reduced to infecting about 85,000 computers, far less than it had infected a year earlier.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
During the Russo-Georgian War, a series of cyberattacks swamped and disabled websites of numerous South Ossetian, Georgian, Russian and Azerbaijani organisations. The attacks were initiated three weeks before the shooting war began.
The February 2010 Australian cyberattacks were a series of denial-of-service attacks conducted by the Anonymous online community against the Australian government in response to proposed web censorship regulations. Operation Titstorm was the name given to the cyber attacks by the perpetrators. They resulted in lapses of access to government websites on 10 and 11 February 2010. This was accompanied by emails, faxes, and phone calls harassing government offices. The actual size of the attack and number of perpetrators involved is unknown but it was estimated that the number of systems involved ranged from the hundreds to the thousands. The amount of traffic caused disruption on multiple government websites.
Operation Payback was a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on high-profile opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites; piracy proponents then decided to launch DDoS attacks on piracy opponents. The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals.
Jigsaw LLC is a technology incubator created by Google. As of February 2020, it is under Google management and used to operate as an independent subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Based in New York City, Jigsaw is dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions, from "countering extremism", online censorship and cyber-attacks, to protecting access to information. Jared Cohen, formerly with the Policy Planning Committee at the US State Department, was the CEO of Jigsaw until 2022, and was formerly co-founder and director of Google Ideas.
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are located in San Francisco, California. According to The Hill, it is used by more than 20 percent of the entire Internet for its web security services as of 2022.
DDoS mitigation is a set of network management techniques and/or tools, for resisting or mitigating the impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on networks attached to the Internet, by protecting the target, and relay networks. DDoS attacks are a constant threat to businesses and organizations, by delaying service performance, or by shutting down a website entirely.
UGNazi is a hacker group. The group conducted a series of cyberattacks, including social engineering, data breach, and denial-of-service attacks, on the websites of various organizations in 2012. Two members of UGNazi were arrested in June 2012; one was incarcerated. In December 2018, two members of UGNazi were arrested in connection with a murder in Manila.
We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists is a 2012 documentary film about the workings and beliefs of the self-described "hacktivist" collective, Anonymous.
Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.
Voat Inc was an American alt-tech news aggregator and social networking service where registered community members could submit content such as text posts and direct links. Registered users could then vote on these submissions. Content entries were organized by areas of interest called "subverses". The website was widely described as a Reddit clone and a hub for the alt-right. Justin Chastain made an announcement on December 22, 2020 that Voat would shut down. The site was shut down on December 25, 2020.
High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) is an open-source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application designed to attack as many as 256 URLs at the same time. It was designed to replace the Low Orbit Ion Cannon which was developed by Praetox Technologies and later released into the public domain. The security advisory for HOIC was released by Prolexic Technologies in February 2012.
On October 21, 2016, three consecutive distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against the Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn. The attack caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America. The groups Anonymous and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack, but scant evidence was provided.
Distributed Denial of Secrets, abbreviated DDoSecrets, is a non-profit whistleblower site for news leaks founded in 2018. Sometimes referred to as a successor to WikiLeaks, it is best known for its June 2020 publication of a large collection of internal police documents, known as BlueLeaks. The group has also published data on Russian oligarchs, fascist groups, shell companies, tax havens and banking in the Cayman Islands, as well as data scraped from Parler in January 2021 and from the February 2021 Gab leak. The group is also known for publishing emails from military officials, City Hall in Chicago and the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As of April 2022, the site hosts dozens of terabytes of data from over 200 organizations.
Deflect is a DDoS mitigation and website security service by eQualitie, a Canadian social enterprise developing open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, resilience and self-determination, to protect and promote human rights and press freedom online.
DDoS-Guard is a Russian Internet infrastructure company which provides DDoS protection and web hosting services. Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online". Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.