Google announced on Dec. 1, it’s reinforcing its commitment to support Ukraine in its war conflict with Russia by announcing new steps that the company is taking to support Ukraine.
The support comes after Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov visited the Google offices in Washington, D.C., and detailed some of the challenges the nation has been facing due to the conflict in Ukraine.
One of the key forms of support that Google has given the Ukrainian government is by delivering 50,000 new google workspace licenses.
“By providing these licenses and giving a year of free access to our Workspace solutions, including our cloud-first, zero-trust security model, we can help ensure Ukrainian public institutions have the security and protection they need to deal with constant threats to their digital systems,” stated the press release.
Google has also announced that they have committed $45 million in cash donations, as well as a new $2 million grant program.
The “Google.org Fellowship to the East Europe Foundation will work with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation to scale the national “Diia” Digital Education Portal. With Google’s support, Diia hopes to provide 1 million people with personalized training and create 600,000 job placements,” stated the press release.
Google will also assist the Ukrainian government with Cybersecurity assistance in their fight against the Russian government by expanding the eligibility of the Project Shield program.
“We expanded eligibility for Project Shield, our free protection against DDoS attacks so that Ukrainian government websites and embassies worldwide could stay online and continue to offer their crucial services. Since then, we’ve continued to implement protections for users and track and disrupt cyber threats,” stated the press release.
The Mandiant, a Google Cloud cybersecurity subsidiary, has also worked closely with the Ukrainian government and the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative (CDAC) to mitigate cyber actors. Some of their actions have included “compromise assessments, incident response services, shared cyber threat intelligence,” according to the press release.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of cyber-attack that have emitted from Russia has increased according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) which has since then released a Cybersecurity Advisory warning of Russian cyber interference.
