Cloudflare is giving away its security tools to US political campaigns

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its free security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference.

The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website firewall, and anti-bot protections.

It’s an expansion of the company’s security offering for journalists, civil rights activists and humanitarian groups under its Project Galileo, which aims to protect against disruptive cyberattacks. The project later expanded to smaller state and local government sites in 2018, with an aim of protecting servers containing voter registration data and other election infrastructure from attacks.

Now the company is offering its security services to 11 of the 17 presidential campaigns, it said, but wants to ensure that its offering is “available to the largest campaigns are also available to smaller campaigns as well.”

Cloudflare’s co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said there was a “clear need” to help campaigns secure not only their public facing websites but also their internal data security.

The company said it’s working with the non-partisan, non-profit organization Defending Digital Campaigns to provide its services to campaigns. Last year the Federal Elections Commission changed the rules to allow political campaigns to receive discounted cybersecurity assistance, which was previously a campaign finance violation.