internet infrastructure company Cloudflare provided free web security service Project Galileo for nearly a decade, giving human rights and public interest organizations around the world access to defenses against DDoS attack and other popular online hacking techniques. More than 2,271 websites in 111 countries are currently using the service, including 81 Ukrainian organizations, the majority of which joined after the Russian invasion in February 2022. The main purpose of Project Galileo. simply use Cloudflare’s products and scale for organizations that may not have any web defenses at all. By examining the threats the different participants are facing, the company also hopes to raise awareness of what could happen next.
In Ukraine, for example, Cloudflare found that emergency response services in many cities have signed up for Project Galileo—including those performing search and rescue; provide medical care; and distribution of supplies such as food, water, and medicine—faced a spike in malicious traffic concurrent with Russian bombings. Many other Ukrainian organizations using Project Galileo are human rights groups or work in the field of independent media and journalism. They often see an uptick in attacks around times of international controversy, like when Russia assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council on April 1.
in one report Released today, Cloudflare has dug into data on attack trends among Project Galileo participants, including those in Ukraine, abortion and reproductive rights organizations, and LGBTQ+ groups. The company says that between July 1, 2022 and May 5, 2023, it mitigated 20 billion attacks against Project Galileo subscribers.
“We don’t specifically blame the source of the attacks,” said David Belson, head of data insights at Cloudflare. “But we are seeing things happening in new and unique ways. In Ukraine, if Russia is trying to physically attack them, and then an actor is trying to prevent them from accessing websites that provide emergency resources digitally, that’s an aspect. new edge in war”.
Since last summer, Project Galileo has mitigated an average of 790,000 attacks per day against LGBTQ+ organizations and an average of 1.52 million attacks per day against reproductive rights groups, Cloudflare said. In addition to protecting against DDoS attacks—spam traffic fires that attack a website and bring it down—more and more of the defense that Project Galileo offers comes from Application Firewalls Cloudflare’s Web. This service helps protect websites against actual web application vulnerability exploits, including attempts by hackers to launch common attacks such as malicious scripting and base manipulation. data.
“In those cases, that means less violent attacks—’I’ll try to take this site down by throwing a massive amount of junk traffic at it’—and possibly a bit more mature, probing attack trying to find a way in,” said Belson. “The purpose then is not to take them down, but to do something more malicious, such as filtering data.”
Even so, protecting small or under-resourced websites against DDoS attacks remains a key component of Project Galileo’s product. And the Cloudflare researchers stress that it’s important for websites to have some sort of protection, even if they’ve never been targeted before, because sites with a lot of traffic Low days, such as those that provide resources for a small or regional audience, can be easily hacked. overwhelmed by a sudden DDoS attack.
“The goal is to provide some background information to civil society groups to get them thinking about what they should protect,” said Alissa Starzak, vice president and global head of public policy at Cloudflare. defend against and show that these threats are real.” “We often see attacks on websites if something happens in the real world—arguing over a topic, focusing on a particular topic. The organizations targeted are the ones that are driving that.”
