Google steps into the cyber-defense industry with ‘Project Shield’

Over its years as an Internet behemoth, Google has learned a lot about fighting hackers who would knock its services off the web. Now it’s offering its muscle to a far more vulnerable set of targets.

On Monday the company announced that it will offer free protection for websites against so-called “distributed denial-of-service” cyberattacks that flood them with junk traffic from hundreds or thousands of computers, taking them offline. The project, which is part of the company’s Google Ideas initiative to take on global problems, has already been working for months with at-risk sites around the world in countries like Iran, Syria, Burma and other places where sites with political content are often subject to attack, and will expand in its initial phase to hundreds of sites.