US firm offers free cybersecurity help to federal campaigns

A major U.S. web infrastructure and security company will be providing free support to federal election campaigns, hoping to help thwart any repeats of large-scale effort by Russian nts in 2016 to steal and leak sensitive campaign emails and documents.

San Francisco-based Cloudflare said Wednesday it will be providing to eligible campaigns free access to several of its security services, including enhanced protection of firewalls, which defend systems and networks from unauthorized access. Or services include protection and mitigation of any denial-of-service attacks, which can paralyze a network by overwhelming it with data.

effort is being offered in conjunction with Defending Digital Campaigns, a nprofit group that last year received approval from Federal Elections Commission to provide free or discounted cybersecurity services to federal candidate committees and national party committees.

To qualify, a U.S. House candidate’s campaign must have received at least $50,000 in contributions, with minimum of $100,000 in contributions for U.S. Senate candidates. In dition, any House or Senate campaign that has qualified for general election also will be eligible.

“This is our way of providing best practices and -brainer solutions to t only large campaigns, but also smaller, but equally important campaigns that may have limited resources,” Cloudflare CEO Matw Prince said in a statement.

company said it’s alrey providing services to eight 2020 presidential candidates. For context, it said it defends an aver of 400,000 attacks daily on U.S. election campaigns, which includes presidential campaigns and at least 23 U.S. Senate campaigns.

Since 2017, Cloudflare also has offered free security services to more than 150 state and local election websites.