Election Hacking: Google To Help Protect Against Cyber Attacks On Elections

Google and its sister company Jigsaw are launching an effort to provide cybersecurity support to election organizations and civic groups, according to a report from Reuters.

The two companies are offering a “Protect Your Election” package for free to low-budget operations to help them fend off cyber attacks and insure the integrity of the electoral process. A version of the protection has been offered to new organizations as a service called Project Shield.

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The Protect Your Election suite provides groups that run elections with a defense against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that can overload servers and shut down computer systems—a safeguard that usually costs thousands of dollars to maintain.

DDoS attacks—which have increased in recent years as the resources to carry out such an attack have become more accessible—have been used to target election monitors and news organizations in a number of countries including Myanmar, Malaysia, Ecuador, Mexico, Montenegro and the Netherlands.

Through Jigsaw, a feature called Password Alert will also be offered. The service will provide two-factor authentication for web and mobile accounts to help protect against attempts to hack the accounts.

News organizations, human rights sites, election monitoring organizations, and information distribution sites will all be eligible to use the DDoS protection provided by Protect Your Election. Campaigns and candidates won’t but, but can make use of the Password Alert service to protect their accounts.

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A number of countries with upcoming elections will be taking advantage of Protect Your Election, including France, South Korea and Germany.

The service was previously put to use in the Netherlands when a website that helped visitors see which candidate they most closely aligned with was knocked offline. The site was reportedly used by about half of Dutch voters until it went dark due to an influx of traffic just before the election.

While the source of that attack remains unknown, the service provided by Google and Jigsaw was used to help get the website back online by election day.