A US company has developed free online tools to help online news outlets protect themselves from cyberattacks.

Such tools are needed to protect the freedom of the press and prevent censorship, said Dan Keyserling, a spokesman from tech security company Jigsaw.

“One of the key areas we are working on is ending repressive censorship online. This is an acute threat to news organisations that can’t necessarily afford or don’t have the expertise to equip themselves with the latest defensive tools,” he said at seminar for international media organised by the US Foreign Press Centre and attended by The Malaysian Insight.

The session was on Media Literacy and Combating Misinformation and Disinformation. 

Keyserling said Jigsaw was an incubator company within Alphabet – Google’s parent company – that builds technology to tackle global security issues, including the protection of news organisations.

“We are improving our ability to detect cyber attacks, which have been increasing.

“It hard to characterise all cyber activity in the world. One of the things we look at are how big the attacks are and how we can try to approach them,” he said.

Products Jigsaw has created for news organisations include Project Shield and Outline, which can be useful for outlets that operate in places that restrict freedom of expression, Jigsaw product manager Justin Kosslyn said.

Project Shield, for example, protects a news portal from distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.

“We provide this service for free as we are not trying to generate revenue but trying to protect free expression,” he said.  

Outline, meanwhile, simplifies the process of creating a virtual private network (VPN).

“Even in some countries, free expression is routinely blocked. What a VPN does is build a tunnel out from the device to a point on the free and open web, and all traffic goes through that tunnel.

“Outline is a free service and all the code for it is published on the internet. Any news organisations can run Outline on their server and they don’t need a new server,” he said. – November 3, 2018.