Deflect – reliable website protection
In October 2022, the Center for Civil Liberties protected its website https://ccl.org.ua/ from DDoS attacks with the service Deflect offered by Canadian organization eQualitie. What is that and how to use it?
Why is it relevant?
One of the aspects of digital security is the protection of your website from DDoS attacks – during the war Russian hacker groups target Ukrainian websites on a daily basis. The hoster who provides hosting services for your website is often not able to provide full protection, thus, websites might be down due to heavy traffic from infected computer networks.
One can find many technological solutions to DDoS attacks on the market, mostly they are services from large corporations such as Cloudflare, which offer free limited packages for organizations.
Canadian organization eQualitie, developer of Deflect, specializes in creating technical solutions specifically for human rights defenders, NGOs, and the media. Their services for Ukrainian organizations are free, and their partner in Ukraine is NGO Internews Ukraine with whom they recently launched the Nadiyno Digital Security Hotline https://nadiyno.org/.
How does Deflect work?
The essence of Deflect protection is that instead of a direct request from the visitor to the server on which the site (origin) runs, the request will go to the IP addresses of Deflect servers, which run reverse proxies with modules for detecting and analyzing DDoS attacks.
“Good” requests are either served from the cache or proxied to the origin. Identified “bad” requests are blocked. To better protect sites, Deflect also relies on machine learning in its work.
How do I connect to Deflect?
If you represent an NGO or media outlet – register as a non-profit organization for free signup – https://dashboard.deflect.ca/signup-np. If you meet the criteria for free signup, you will receive instructions on the next steps.
You will not need to transfer your hosting, but you will need to make adjustments at the domain level of your site. Deflect experts provide attack analytics and technical support. If you don’t have a tech professional, they can help you. Contact eQualitie for more details: https://deflect.ca/contact-us/
