Digital Attack Map Dramatizes Need for Google's "Project Shield"

Google's  Big Picture Group has created a pretty visualization of global denial of service attacks. According to the Attack Map about page:

"Digital Attack Map is a live data visualization of DDoS attacks around the globe, built through a collaboration between Google Ideas and Arbor Networks.  The tool surfaces anonymous attack traffic data to let users explore historic trends and find reports of outages happening on a given day."

This "Attack Map" is promoting Project Shield.   Project Shield is a Google  "initiative to use Google's infrastructure to protect free expression online" from DDoS attacks. Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg has written a brief description of Project Shield.   Greenberg quotes Google Idea's associate C.J. Adams on the beta roll-out:

“We’re able to take the people who face the greatest threats to [distributed denial of service] attacks and get them behind our protection,” says CJ Adams, an associate with Google who announced the Shield project at a company summit in New York. “If they face an attack, it has to get through us first, and after years of working on this we’re pretty good at stopping these attacks.”

"Among the beta users of Project Shield are the Persian-language political blog Balatarin, a Syrian website called Aymta that provides early warnings of scud missile launches, and an election monitoring website in Kenya called the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission. Adams said in his talk at the summit that Project Shield had enabled the Kenyan site to stay online through a Kenyan election for the first time in its attack-ridden history."

 

Dan Stuckey has a nice post about this on Motherboard:

While Digital Attack Map is a public service announcement that'll likely captivate a long stare (and fall deaf on many ears, like my mom's), this live map is anything but underwhelming. For those bored with the live map, the site features playbacks of bigger DDoS attacks in recent history. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you can watch Citizen's Bank, Github/Obamacare, and Al-Qaida's forums be attacked.

So now we can sit back and watch these attacks live or in replay as they stream accross the network.  Assuming the DDoS doesn't take the site you are watching down with it  . . .  Popcorn optional.