HiiL

Fortifying the Path to Justice: How HiiL Scales Resilience with Project Galileo

The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to making justice more accessible, people-centered, and effective through research, data-driven dashboards, and innovation. As HiiL’s global influence expanded in 2024, so did its digital footprint, attracting the sophisticated cybersecurity challenges that often target high-impact international organisations. This included repeated DDoS attacks that took their website offline during critical periods for program applications and research dissemination.

By integrating Cloudflare’s Project Galileo, HiiL has elevated its digital infrastructure into a high-performance environment, ensuring that individuals and justice stakeholders worldwide maintain unfailing access to vital resources.

“Before joining Project Galileo, DDoS attacks repeatedly took our website offline during critical programme periods. With Cloudflare in place, those same attacks are now absorbed automatically, and we’ve had zero downtime since June 2025.” — Khaled Aldroubi, IT Manager, HiiL

Upholding the Open Internet through Resilience

For organizations like HiiL, the Internet is a primary vehicle for social change. When malicious actors use DDoS attacks to silence justice-focused platforms, they threaten the principles of the Open Internet.

Since joining Project Galileo in May 2025, HiiL has achieved 100% uptime. This stability is critical for HiiL’s Justice Accelerator which sees high-traffic application periods from entrepreneurs around the world, and HiiL’s Justice Dashboard, which provides continuous access to reports, dashboards, and datasets used by policymakers, practitioners, and researchers worldwide.

The impact of Cloudflare’s security suite on HiiL’s operations is evidenced by the data. In a 30-day window, HiiL’s digital infrastructure supported 137.99k unique visitors and managed 2.63 million total requests.

The efficiency of this delivery is bolstered by Cloudflare’s caching capabilities. By serving content from the Cloudflare edge, HiiL has reduced the load on its origin servers. This not only improves site speed for users accessing dashboards from diverse geographic regions but also provides a buffer against traffic surges.

“The combination of DDoS protection, WAF, and global caching means our focus has shifted from firefighting incidents to supporting justice innovation worldwide.” - Khaled Aldroubi, IT Manager, HiiL

Cloudflare Products & Impact

HiiL utilizes a suite of Cloudflare tools to maintain its security posture:

• DDoS Protection: Automatically identifies and absorbs volumetric attacks. This was instrumental in mitigating a recent spike of over 15,000 threat requests in a single day without any impact on site availability.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF): Provides a robust defense against malicious requests and bot abuse. In the last 30 days alone, the WAF mitigated 21,580 threats, protecting HiiL’s public research and justice needs data platforms.
• Global CDN & Caching: Distributes HiiL’s content across a global network, ensuring that research reports and data dashboards are highly performant for a global audience while saving 85 GB of bandwidth on the origin server.
• Cloudflare Analytics & Traffic Insights: Offers real-time visibility into traffic patterns, allowing the IT team to monitor performance during high-stakes global campaigns with confidence.

A Force Multiplier for Civil Society

For HiiL, the transition to Cloudflare represents more than just a technical upgrade; it is a shift in organizational capacity. With limited resources, an NGO-sized IT team cannot spend every hour defending against evolving cyber threats. By automating these defenses, HiiL can refocus its energy on its core mission: advancing people-centered justice.

“Cloudflare gives HiiL enterprise-grade security without the enterprise overhead. For a mission-driven organisation with limited resources, that has been transformational.”