Press release

Cloudflare and 28 Partner Organizations Celebrate Fifth Anniversary of Project Galileo

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Sponsored by Businesswire

Cloudflare,
a leading Internet performance, security, and reliability company, is
today celebrating the fifth anniversary of Project
Galileo, an initiative that
equips politically and artistically
important organizations and journalists with powerful tools to defend
themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, at no
cost. To mark the anniversary, Cloudflare is offering a look at the
program’s momentum, statistics, and growing recipient base.

The Internet is a powerful tool for spreading and amplifying ideas.
Cloudflare launched Project Galileo in 2014 as a response to cyber
attacks launched against important, yet vulnerable targets, such as
artistic groups, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political
dissent. Such organizations often face attacks from powerful and
entrenched opponents, yet operate on limited budgets and lack the
resources to secure themselves against malicious traffic intended to
silence them.

“Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. When
journalists, social activists, and social welfare groups are repeatedly
flooded with malicious traffic in an attempt to knock them offline, and
keep them offline, the Internet stops fulfilling its promise,” said
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Project Galileo is
one of the initiatives I’m most proud of, and in concert with our
critical partners, the program has helped to keep vulnerable voices
online.”

Key attack statistics from the last month include:

  • Every single Project Galileo recipient has been subject to attacks in
    the last month
  • The average Project Galileo site saw malicious traffic for 27 days out
    of the 30 day period
  • 60% of sites experienced daily attacks
  • Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) blocked more than 4.5
    million requests

The nearly 600 recipients of Project Galileo include Bullying Canada,
VOST Portugal, Women’s March Global, Free Mom Hugs, and Majal.org
(formerly Mideast Youth):

“After we moved onto Cloudflare, our site reliability was restored.
Without Galileo, we’d have to invest a lot of money into getting the
same kind of protection. We’re a non-profit with very limited resources
and we need to invest them wisely. For us to be able to get this level
of protection from Cloudflare for free—it’s a huge help.” – Majal.org

“Free Mom Hugs provides a platform to help advocate for and provide
resources to the LGBTQ+ community. Because we work to connect people and
build community, our online presence is crucial. Cloudflare’s Project
Galileo has enabled us to withstand cyber attacks and carry out our
mission.” – Free
Mom Hugs

“At BullyingCanada, we focus on giving a voice and resources to bullied
youth in our communities. We rely on Cloudflare through Project Galileo
to keep our site accessible and secure at all times so that youth,
families, and teachers have access to all of the resources necessary to
stop bullying situations and achieve brighter, healthier futures.” – BullyingCanada

“Our mission at Women’s March Global is to unite women worldwide in
order to advance women’s human rights. We use our online platform to
achieve this goal and need it to be both reliable and affordable, no
matter how many people visit our site or how many attacks we see. Using
Project Galileo has allowed us to enormously reduce our costs and devote
those funds instead to making our platform even better for users, and
therefore, better for women worldwide.” – Women’s
March Global

“Digital citizenship really works. We still live under the impression
that, for some of us, volunteering means stepping out of our comfort
zone, and where our knowledge might not be needed, but that couldn’t be
farther from the truth. However, doing so requires having a reliable and
secure website. With unplanned crises and events, such as natural
disasters or strikes, happening at any given time, the tools provided
through Project Galileo help us bring reliable information to the
population and get people involved, in a timely and effective manner,
with no downtime whatsoever.” – VOST
Portugal

Cloudflare offers services through Project Galileo to any proposed
recipient if referred or approved by any of the trusted partners. In
five years, the number of Project Galileo partners has grown from 15 to
28, and includes groups such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI),
the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Fourth Estate, and Access
Now:

“Our partnership with Cloudflare has allowed many organizations on the
frontlines of democracy development to stay online in the face of
attacks from authoritarians or extremists. Doing so allows NDI to
advance its mission to support and strengthen democratic institutions
around the world,” said Martin Colburn, Chief Technology Officer at the National
Democratic Institute
. “We joined Project Galileo as a partner in
2017 to expand our role in keeping these voices and organizations online
so that they can continue to do their important work.”

“We’ve been a proud partner of Project Galileo since its launch five
years ago and continue to believe in its importance. Digital human
rights are crucial to the future of the Internet, and Cloudflare has
shown great leadership in ensuring that vulnerable content online cannot
be silenced by attacks,” said Joe Hall, Chief Technologist at the Center
for Democracy & Technology
.

“A healthy society is only possible if it has a sustainable and vibrant
free press,” said Jeff Brown, Executive Director of Fourth
Estate Public Benefit Corporation
. “As such, Fourth Estate has
partnered with Cloudflare’s Project Galileo to help press organizations
and independent journalists access free services to keep their voices
online. It’s a cause that is both worthy and necessary for the benefit
of societies worldwide.”

“Attacks on civil society websites are a reality. In particular, DDoS
attacks continue to censor speech and are a real threat to so many
groups across the globe,” said Brett Solomon, Executive Director of
Access Now. “Cloudflare’s Project Galileo stood up to this global threat
five years ago, providing a reliable and effective mechanism to defend
the most at-risk users from being taken off the Internet.”

To learn more about Project Galileo and its recipients and partners,
check out the resources below.

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com
/ @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today
the company runs one of the world’s largest networks, with nearly 10
percent of the Fortune 1,000 as paying customers and approximately 19
percent of the top 10,000 websites using at least one Cloudflare product
on a paid or free basis. Cloudflare’s platform protects and accelerates
any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing
software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by
Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global
network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see
significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other
attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company
Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative
Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA,
Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San
Jose, CA, Washington, D.C., London, Munich, Beijing, Singapore, and
Sydney.