Google has unveiled plans to offer anti-hacking technology called Project Shield to political organisations in Europe, amid fears of election tampering ahead of the European Union elections in May.

Google's experimental incubator Jigsaw has said it will offer free cyber protection to political parties and candidates from Tuesday after citing a "pressing concern" to defend elections from digital attacks.

The technology is able to shield websites from DDoS attacks, which overload them with junk traffic and block legitimate users from accessing services.

Scott Carpenter, Jigsaw's managing director of international policy, said: "Project Shield was launched in 2016 to protect independent news and human rights organizations from DDoS attacks, but in the wake of major election breaches and targeted political cyber attacks, Project Shield can now be used to give political groups the same defence."

Project Shield is able to ward off DDoS attacks by using a technique called "reverse proxy", which filters the traffic coming into and out of a website and scans it for malicious traffic. It can also cache, or save, versions of content to show to visitors and reduce the amount of traffic requests to a website.

Jigsaw has previously used Google's defense technology, which was initially build to protect news organisations and human rights groups, in the US midterm elections for the same purpose.

The tech incubator, set up in 2010 and previously known as Google Ideas, was founded by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas chief executive Jared Cohen to "tackle the toughest geopolitical issues". The incubator is now part of parent company Alphabet.

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Technology companies have scrambled to avoid claims of election rigging following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Earlier this month, Facebook announced plans to toughen its advertising rules for countries with major elections this year. This change means that only advertisers in the country where elections are taking place can book adverts for that area.

However, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that election interference and harmful speech are issues that “can never fully be solved” by Facebook in a year-end post on the social media site last year.

Meanwhile, Twitter introduced the requirement for new accounts to be confirmed with either email addresses or phone numbers to "defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness".