INFOGRAPHIC
Cloudflare’ s Project Galileo: Defending public interest organisations from escalating cyberthreats
Cloudflare’ s Project Galileo continues to provide critical cybersecurity protection to at-risk public interest organisations globally, a decade after its inception in June 2014.
The initiative offers free protection to groups including journalists, human rights advocates, independent media outlets and environmental activists, who often operate on the frontlines of civil society, democracy and environmental justice and are frequent targets of cyberattacks.
Recent data from a Cloudflare Radar report highlights the intensifying threat landscape faced by these organisations. Between 1 May 2024 and 31 March 2025, Project Galileo successfully blocked 108.9 billion cyber threats against its protected entities, averaging nearly 325.2 million attacks per day. This represents a substantial 241 % increase in blocked threats compared to the previous year’ s figures. The report indicates a growing prevalence of Distributed Denial-of-Service( DDoS) attacks, which are now more common than attempts to exploit traditional web application vulnerabilities.
Journalism and news organisations bore the brunt of these attacks, experiencing over 97 billion blocked requests across 315 different entities. A notable incident occurred on 28 September 2024, which marked the peak attack traffic for this sector.
Belarus
On 27 September 2024, the Belarusian Investigative Center, an independent journalism organisation, was onboarded to Project Galileo while already under attack. The following day, it faced a major applicationlayer DDoS attack that generated over 28 billion requests in a single day. Many of the targets within this category were investigative journalism outlets operating in regions under government pressure, such as Russia and Belarus, alongside NGOs focused on combating racism, extremism and defending workers’ rights.
Human Rights and Civil Society Organisations constituted the second most targeted category, enduring 8.9 billion blocked requests, with their peak attack activity recorded on 8 October 2024. An example includes Tech4Peace, a human rights organisation focused on digital rights, which was subjected to a 12-day attack commencing on 10 March 2025. This attack delivered over 2.7 billion requests and demonstrated a coordinated approach with varying intensities, indicating adaptive tactics by the attackers.
The full Cloudflare Radar report offers comprehensive insights into the cyberthreats confronting public
26 INTELLIGENTCIO EUROPE www. intelligentcio. com