Jigsaw, Google’s technology incubator, continues to maintain its “Protect Your Election” toolkit, which offers a similar suite of services as Cloudflare’s Athenian Project, to election officials, as well as candidates, campaign staff and media covering elections. The toolkit includes Project Shield, a filter that protects websites from DDoS attacks, and Google’s Advanced Protection Program, which provides an extra layer of account security by limiting which third-party apps can access Gmail and requiring a physical token, such as a YubiKey, for two-factor authentication.
Google this year has also partnered with the University of Southern California on a 50-state series of election security workshops, featuring secretaries of state, federal and industry cybersecurity experts and local journalists. While Google and USC were able to hold the first few sessions in-person in February, the sessions — like everything else in 2020 — were reorganized as virtual events after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
