NEW YORK (AP) – An organization affiliated with Google is offering tools that news organizations and election-related sites can use to protect themselves from hacking.
Jigsaw, a research arm of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., says that free and fair elections depend on access to information. . To ensure such access, Jigsaw says, sites for news, human rights and election monitoring need to be protected from cyberattacks.
Jigsaw’s suite of tools, called Protect Your Election, is mostly a repackaging of existing tools:
– Project Shield will help websites guard against denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers flood sites with so much traffic that legitimate visitors can’t get through. Users of Project Shield will be tapping technology and servers that Google already uses to protect its own sites from such attacks.
– Password Alert is software that people can add to Chrome browsers to warn them when they try to enter their Google password on another site, often a sign of a phishing attempt.