Security and web performance company Cloudflare has announced a suite of services for the cyber-protection of political campaigns in the United States and worldwide.
After helping U.S. state and local government entities secure their election websites, for free, as part of the 2017 Athenian Project, the company feels that the targeting of political parties and candidates for office shows a need to also secure campaign websites and internal tools.
The newly announced Cloudflare for Campaigns aims to deliver cyber-security services to all political campaigns and parties, especially to those that have small teams and limited resources.
Cloudflare, which has provided services to 18 major presidential campaigns and various congressional campaigns during the 2020 U.S. election cycle, says it blocks over 400,000 cyber-attacks targeting political campaigns on an average day. On busy days, that number tops 40 million attacks.
With Cloudflare for Campaigns, the company aims to deliver the necessary services for political campaigns to stay protected, especially those that lack the resources to focus on cybersecurity on their own.
Cloudflare for Campaigns delivers business-level service, along with security tools for websites, including a web application firewall, rate limiting, load balancing, bot management, and multi-user account enablement.
To keep internal teams protected, campaigns will leverage Cloudflare Access, which allows them to secure, authenticate, and monitor user access to domains, applications, or paths on Cloudflare. They will also benefit from DNS-based filtering via Cloudflare Gateway, to help prevent users from running into phishing scams or malware sites.
“Cloudflare for Campaigns also includes Cloudflare reliability and security guide, which lists a best practice guide for political campaigns to maintain their campaign site and secure their internal teams,” the protection provider reveals.
Cloudflare says it has partnered with non-profit Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) to provide the new services for free to candidates and parties that meet the non-profit organization’s criteria. House or Senate candidates, as well as presidential candidates may be eligible to benefit from these services.
“Although political campaigns are regulated differently all around the world, Cloudflare believes that the integrity of all political campaigns should be protected against powerful adversaries. With this in mind, Cloudflare will therefore also be offering Cloudflare for Campaigns as a paid service, designed to help campaigns all around the world as we attempt to address regulatory hurdles,” the company also announced.
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