Google will be providing extra protection against online threats to at-risk organizations and individuals during the upcoming 2022 Philippine elections.

Protecting websites

Google is inviting Philippine human rights, elections monitoring, and media organizations as well as individual journalists to apply to Project Shield. Project Shield, created by Jigsaw and Google, provides free unlimited protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, a type of digital attack used to censor information by taking websites offline.

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Project Shield filters out malicious traffic using Google’s infrastructure and DDoS tools. If a website is targeted by a DDoS attack, Google’s servers will block attacking traffic to keep the website up and running.

(Jigsaw is a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies, and builds technology that inspires scalable solutions.)

Protecting individual accounts

Google’s Advanced Protection Program (APP) is designed to help protect policymakers, candidates, campaign teams, journalists, and activists from cyberattacks. Ahead of the Philippine elections, Google is offering to enroll these individuals into APP in order for them to be protected against a wide variety of online threats, including sophisticated phishing attacks, malware and other malicious downloads on Chrome and Android, and unauthorized access to their personal account data (such as Gmail, Drive or Photos). As new threats are discovered, APP evolves to provide the latest protections.

APP brings Google’s strongest security protections together into a holistic program that is constantly upgraded in response to emerging threats.