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Deflect responds to the COVID19 emergency with free services

In response and solidarity with numerous efforts that have sprung up to help with communications, coordination and outreach during the COVID-19 epidemic, eQualitie is offering Deflect website security and content delivery services for free until the end of 2020 to organizations and individuals working to help others during this difficult time. This includes:

Availability: as demand for your content grows, our worldwide infrastructure will ensure that your website remains accessible and fast
Security: protecting your website from malicious bots and hackers
Hosting: for existing or new WordPress sites
Aanalytics: view real-time statistics in the Deflect dashboard

Deflect is always offered free of charge to not-for-profit entities that meet our eligibility requirements. This offer extends our free services to any business or individual that is responding to societal needs during the pandemic, including media organizations, government, online retail and hospitality services, etc. We will review all applications to make sure they align with Deflect’s Terms of Use.

It takes 15 minutes to set up and we’ll have you protected on the same day. Our support team can help you in English, French, Chinese, Spanish and Russian. If you have any questions please contact us.

In the last 12 months we have seen steady growth in many aspects of the Deflect project, particularly with respect to membership, traffic, localisation and network capacity. The most significant contributing factors have been the uptake of more partners, the efficacy of our new banning software and the continued rise in DDoS attacks as a form of censorship.

To this end, we have more than doubled the number of our partners, so Deflected sites now operate in 17 languages and focus on affairs in 55 countries across the world. In addition, we have taken on more sites that report news or advocate for issues from a transnational perspective, resulting in a more even distribution of traffic from around the world.

A comparison between the first quarters of 2013 and 2014 shows this clearly.

We see that unique visitors have nearly tripled, the number of visits has more than doubled, page requests have all multiplied, hits are between four and five times as many and we are dealing with at least twice the amount of bandwidth as this time last year. The figures continue to grow as we move into March and April because of the current Ukraine situation. In the wake of the Euromaidan protests, the fall of the Yanukovich government and the annexation of the Crimea, we brought onto the network a number of key independent news sites operating in the region that have brought with them a large amount of traffic and a comparable amount of DDoS attacks.

The figures above are only for the legitimate traffic served. With respect to malicious requests, we saw an average of around 8MBps across the network for the month and when we first took on the Ukranian sites in March we saw spikes of 200 bots per edge.