Yesterday, Google announced Project Shield, a suite of free tools to help small websites stay online during DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. To accompany it, Google has also made available a live map of DDoS attacks which shows when and where they’re happening.

Put together in conjunction with Arbor Networks, the Digital Attack Map updates every hour with anonymous DDoS events from over 270 ISPs. The animated map shows of inbound, outbound and internal attacks between and within countries, providing details about duration, bandwidth and a bunch of other stuff.

There’s a caveat: the data is necessarily incomplete—because it relies on the customers of Arbor Networks—and in fact it can sometimes even be incorrect. The origin of attacks, in particularcan be masked, but that doesn’t stop it being an interesting resource. The fully animated map isembedded below. [Google via Engadget]