Attacking your enemies online can be incredibly cheap. For those who know where to look, it can cost as little as $150 to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a website and take it offline.

Well, Google happens to think that’s not fair, and so today it’s launching a new tool aimed at helping journalists and news organizations stave off such attacks. Project Shield is a free service that re-routes malicious traffic away from your server and into its own infrastructure where it can easily be absorbed, thus preventing your site from being overwhelmed.

Project Shield is a product of Google’s Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas, which has the stated goal of building “products to help people investigate corruption”.

Previously available as an invite-only beta, Project Shield’s DDoS protection is now being offered to all independent websites that appear in Google News, but not for larger organizations like Fox, CNN and BBC, which are large enough to pay for their own protection against cyber attacks.

Those sites who sign up for it will have all their traffic re-routed through Google’s domain name servers, which are able to filter out malicious traffic. Google will of course collect data from that traffic, but the company insists it will only use that information to learn more about attacks, not for its targeted advertising. After two weeks, the data will be deleted, Google added.

Google told Wired it believes it’s doing the world a favor with Project Shield. It says that keeping independent news sites online is an extension of its core mission, which is to make information available to the world. To date, Google says it’s helped keep more than one hundred sites, covering everything from politics and election monitoring to human rights news, online in the face of DDoS attacks.

Google has also launched a somewhat complementary Digital Attack Map service, which illustrates the intensity of the dozens of DDoS attacks that take place across the Web every single day.

News website administrators can sign up for Project Shield protection today, though they’re required to have a Google account in order to do so.

Image credit: Vicki Burton via flickr.com