Slashing agent token costs by 98% with RFC 9457-compliant error responses
AI agents are no longer experiments. They are production infrastructure, making billions of HTTP requests per day, navigating the web, calling APIs, and orchestrating complex workflows.
But when these agents hit an error, they still receive the same HTML error pages we built for browsers: hundreds of lines of markup, CSS, and copy designed for human eyes. Those pages give agents clues, not instructions, and waste time and tokens. That gap is the opportunity to give agents instructions, not obstacles.
Starting today, Cloudflare returns RFC 9457-compliant structured Markdown and JSON error payloads to AI agents, replacing heavyweight HTML pages with machine-readable instructions.
That means when an agent sends Accept: text/markdown, Accept: application/json, or Accept: application/problem+json and encounters a Cloudflare error, we return one semantic contract in a structured format instead of HTML. And it comes complete with actionable guidance. (This builds on our recent Markdown for Agents release.)
So instead of being told only "You were blocked," the agent will read: "You were rate-limited — wait 30 seconds and retry with exponential backoff." Instead of just "Access denied," the agent will be instructed: "This block is intentional: do not retry, contact the site owner."
AI Security for Apps is now generally available
Cloudflare’s AI Security for Apps detects and mitigates threats to AI-powered applications. Today, we're announcing that it is generally available.
We’re shipping with new capabilities like detection for custom topics, and we're making AI endpoint discovery free for every Cloudflare customer—including those on Free, Pro, and Business plans—to give everyone visibility into where AI is deployed across their Internet-facing apps.
We're also announcing an expanded collaboration with IBM, which has chosen Cloudflare to deliver AI security to its cloud customers. And we’re partnering with Wiz to give mutual customers a unified view of their AI security posture.
Traditional web applications have defined operations: check a bank balance, make a transfer. You can write deterministic rules to secure those interactions.
AI-powered applications and agents are different. They accept natural language and generate unpredictable responses. There's no fixed set of operations to allow or deny, because the inputs and outputs are probabilistic. Attackers can manipulate large language models to take unauthorized actions or leak sensitive data. Prompt injection, sensitive information disclosure, and unbounded consumption are just a few of the risks cataloged in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications.
These risks escalate as AI Continue reading
Building a security overview dashboard for actionable insights
For years, the industry’s answer to threats was “more visibility.” But more visibility without context is just more noise. For the modern security team, the biggest challenge is no longer a lack of data; it is the overwhelming surplus of it. Most security professionals start their day navigating a sea of dashboards, hunting through disparate logs to answer a single, deceptively simple question: "What now?"
When you are forced to pivot between different tools just to identify a single misconfiguration, you’re losing the window of opportunity to prevent an incident. That’s why we built a revamped Security Overview dashboard: a single interface designed to empower defenders, by moving from reactive monitoring to proactive control.
The new Security Overview dashboard.
Historically, dashboards focused on showing you everything that was happening. But for a busy security analyst, the more important question is, "What do I need to fix right now?"
To solve this, we are introducing Security Action Items. This feature acts as a functional bridge between detection and investigation, surfacing vulnerabilities, so you no longer have to hunt for them. To help you triage effectively, items are ranked by criticality:
Investigating multi-vector attacks in Log Explorer
In the world of cybersecurity, a single data point is rarely the whole story. Modern attackers don’t just knock on the front door; they probe your APIs, flood your network with "noise" to distract your team, and attempt to slide through applications and servers using stolen credentials.
To stop these multi-vector attacks, you need the full picture. By using Cloudflare Log Explorer to conduct security forensics, you get 360-degree visibility through the integration of 14 new datasets, covering the full surface of Cloudflare’s Application Services and Cloudflare One product portfolios. By correlating telemetry from application-layer HTTP requests, network-layer DDoS and Firewall logs, and Zero Trust Access events, security analysts can significantly reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and effectively unmask sophisticated, multi-layered attacks.
Read on to learn more about how Log Explorer gives security teams the ultimate landscape for rapid, deep-dive forensics.
The contemporary digital landscape requires deep, correlated telemetry to defend against adversaries using multiple attack vectors. Raw logs serve as the "flight recorder" for an application, capturing every single interaction, attack attempt, and performance bottleneck. And because Cloudflare sits at the edge, between your users and your servers, all of these Continue reading
Translating risk insights into actionable protection: leveling up security posture with Cloudflare and Mastercard
Every new domain, application, website, or API endpoint increases an organization's attack surface. For many teams, the speed of innovation and deployment outpaces their ability to catalog and protect these assets, often resulting in a "target-rich, resource-poor" environment where unmanaged infrastructure becomes an easy entry point for attackers.
Replacing manual, point-in-time audits with automated security posture visibility is critical to growing your Internet presence safely. That’s why we are happy to announce a planned integration that will enable the continuous discovery, monitoring and remediation of Internet-facing blind spots directly in the Cloudflare dashboard: Mastercard’s RiskRecon attack surface intelligence capabilities.
Information Security practitioners in pay-as-you-go and Enterprise accounts will be able to preview the integration in the third quarter of 2026.
Mastercard’s RiskRecon attack surface intelligence identifies and prioritizes external vulnerabilities by mapping an organization's entire internet footprint using only publicly accessible data. As an outside-in scanner, the solution can be deployed instantly to uncover "shadow IT," forgotten subdomains, and unauthorized cloud servers that internal, credentialed scans often miss. By seeing what an attacker sees in real time, security teams can proactively close security gaps before they can be exploited.
But Continue reading
Fixing request smuggling vulnerabilities in Pingora OSS deployments
In December 2025, Cloudflare received reports of HTTP/1.x request smuggling vulnerabilities in the Pingora open source framework when Pingora is used to build an ingress proxy. Today we are discussing how these vulnerabilities work and how we patched them in Pingora 0.8.0.
The vulnerabilities are CVE-2026-2833, CVE-2026-2835, and CVE-2026-2836. These issues were responsibly reported to us by Rajat Raghav (xclow3n) through our Bug Bounty Program.
Cloudflare’s CDN and customer traffic were not affected, our investigation found. No action is needed for Cloudflare customers, and no impact was detected.
Due to the architecture of Cloudflare’s network, these vulnerabilities could not be exploited: Pingora is not used as an ingress proxy in Cloudflare’s CDN.
However, these issues impact standalone Pingora deployments exposed to the Internet, and may enable an attacker to:
Bypass Pingora proxy-layer security controls
Desync HTTP request/responses with backends for cross-user hijacking attacks (session or credential theft)
Poison Pingora proxy-layer caches retrieving content from shared backends
We have released Pingora 0.8.0 with fixes and hardening. While Cloudflare customers were not affected, we strongly recommend users of the Pingora framework to upgrade as soon as possible.
The reports Continue reading
Active defense: introducing a stateful vulnerability scanner for APIs
Security is traditionally a game of defense. You build walls, set up gates, and write rules to block traffic that looks suspicious. For years, Cloudflare has been a leader in this space: our Application Security platform is designed to catch attacks in flight, dropping malicious requests at the edge before they ever reach your origin. But for API security, defensive posturing isn’t enough.
That’s why today, we are launching the beta of Cloudflare’s Web and API Vulnerability Scanner.
We are starting with the most pervasive and difficult-to-catch threat on the OWASP API Top 10: Broken Object Level Authorization, or BOLA. We will add more vulnerability scan types over time, including both API and web application threats.
The most dangerous API vulnerabilities today aren’t generic injection attacks or malformed requests that a WAF can easily spot. They are logic flaws—perfectly valid HTTP requests that meet the protocol and application spec but defy the business logic.
To find these, you can’t just wait for an attack. You have to actively hunt for them.
The Web and API Vulnerability Scanner will be available first for API Shield customers. Read on to learn why we are focused on API security Continue reading
Complexity is a choice. SASE migrations shouldn’t take years.
For years, the cybersecurity industry has accepted a grim reality: migrating to a zero trust architecture is a marathon of misery. CIOs have been conditioned to expect multi-year deployment timelines, characterized by turning screws, manual configurations, and the relentless care and feeding of legacy SASE vendors.
But at Cloudflare, we believe that kind of complexity is a choice, not a requirement. Today, we are highlighting how our partners are proving that what used to take years now takes weeks. By leveraging Cloudflare One, our agile SASE platform, partners like TachTech and Adapture are showing that the path to safe AI and Zero Trust adoption is faster, more seamless, and more programmable than ever before.
The traditional migration path for legacy SASE products—specifically the deployment of Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)—often stretches to 18 months for large organizations. For a CIO, that represents a year and a half of technical debt and persistent security gaps.
By contrast, partners like TachTech and Adapture are proving that this marathon of misery is not a technical necessity. By using a unified connectivity cloud, they have compressed these timelines from 18 months Continue reading
From the endpoint to the prompt: a unified data security vision in Cloudflare One
Cloudflare One has grown a lot over the years. What started with securing traffic at the network now spans the endpoint and SaaS applications – because that’s where work happens.
But as the market has evolved, the core mission has become clear: data security is enterprise security.
Here’s why. We don’t enforce controls just to enforce controls. We do it because the downstream outcomes are costly: malware, credential theft, session hijacking, and eventually the thing that matters most: sensitive data leaving the organization. What looks like a simple access policy can be the first link in a chain that ends in incident response, customer impact, and reputational damage.
So when you take a step back, most security programs – even the ones that look different on paper – are trying to answer the same questions:
Where is sensitive data?
Who can access it?
What paths exist for it to move somewhere it shouldn’t?
That’s the backbone of our data security vision in Cloudflare One: a single model that follows data across the places it moves, not a pile of siloed controls. That means:
Protection in transit (across Internet + SaaS access)
Visibility and control at rest (inside SaaS)
Enforcement Continue reading
Ending the “silent drop”: how Dynamic Path MTU Discovery makes the Cloudflare One Client more resilient
You’ve likely seen this support ticket countless times: a user’s Internet connection that worked just fine a moment ago for Slack and DNS lookups is suddenly hung the moment they attempt a large file upload, join a video call, or initiate an SSH session. The culprit isn't usually a bandwidth shortage or service outage issue, it is the "PMTUD Black Hole" — a frustration that occurs when packets are too large for a specific network path, but the network fails to communicate that limit back to the sender. This situation often happens when you’re locked into using networks you do not manage or vendors with maximum transmission unit (MTU) restrictions, and you have no means to address the problem.
Today, we are moving past these legacy networking constraints. By implementing Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD), the Cloudflare One Client has shifted from a passive observer to an active participant in path discovery.
Dynamic Path MTU Discovery allows the client to intelligently and dynamically adjust to the optimal packet size for most network paths using MTUs above 1281 bytes. This ensures that a user’s connection remains stable, whether they are on a high-speed corporate backbone or a restrictive cellular network.
The “modern Continue reading
How Automatic Return Routing solves IP overlap
The public Internet relies on a fundamental principle of predictable routing: a single IP address points to a logically unique destination. Even in an Anycast architecture like Cloudflare’s, where one IP is announced from hundreds of locations, every instance of that IP represents the same service. The routing table always knows exactly where a packet is intended to go.
This principle holds up because global addressing authorities assign IP space to organizations to prevent duplication or conflict. When everyone adheres to a single, authoritative registry, a routing table functions as a source of absolute truth.
On the public Internet, an IP address is like a unique, globally registered national identity card. In private networks, an IP is just a name like “John Smith”, which is perfectly fine until you have three of them in the same room trying to talk to the same person.
As we expand Cloudflare One to become the connectivity cloud for enterprise backbones, we’ve entered the messy reality of private IP address space. There are good reasons why duplication arises, and enterprises need solutions to handle these conflicts.
Today, we are introducing Automatic Return Routing (ARR) in Closed Beta. ARR is an optional tool for Continue reading
A QUICker SASE client: re-building Proxy Mode
When you need to use a proxy to keep your zero trust environment secure, it often comes with a cost: poor performance for your users. Soon after deploying a client proxy, security teams are generally slammed with support tickets from users frustrated with sluggish browser speed, slow file transfers, and video calls glitching at just the wrong moment. After a while, you start to chalk it up to the proxy — potentially blinding yourself to other issues affecting performance.
We knew it didn’t have to be this way. We knew users could go faster, without sacrificing security, if we completely re-built our approach to proxy mode. So we did.
In the early days of developing the device client for our SASE platform, Cloudflare One, we prioritized universal compatibility. When an admin enabled proxy mode, the Client acted as a local SOCKS5 or HTTP proxy. However, because our underlying tunnel architecture was built on WireGuard, a Layer 3 (L3) protocol, we faced a technical hurdle: how to get application-layer (L4) TCP traffic into an L3 tunnel. Moving from L4 to L3 was especially difficult because our desktop Client works across multiple platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux) so we couldn’t use Continue reading
Always-on detections: eliminating the WAF “log versus block” trade-off
Traditional Web Application Firewalls typically require extensive, manual tuning of their rules before they can safely block malicious traffic. When a new application is deployed, security teams usually begin in a logging-only mode, sifting through logs to gradually assess which rules are safe for blocking mode. This process is designed to minimize false positives without affecting legitimate traffic. It’s manual, slow and error-prone.
Teams are forced into a trade-off: visibility in log mode, or protection in block mode. When a rule blocks a request, evaluation stops, and you lose visibility into how other signatures would have assessed it — valuable insight that could have helped you tune and strengthen your defenses.
Today, we’re solving this by introducing the next evolution of our managed rules: Attack Signature Detection.
When enabled, this detection inspects every request for malicious payloads and attaches rich detection metadata before any action is taken. You get complete visibility into every signature match, without sacrificing protection or performance. Onboarding becomes simple: traffic is analyzed, data accumulates, and you see exactly which signatures fire and why. You can then build precise mitigation policies based on past traffic, reducing the risk of false positives.
But we’re going one step further. Continue reading
Mind the gap: new tools for continuous enforcement from boot to login
One of our favorite ask-me-anything questions for company meetings or panels at security conferences is the classic: “What keeps you up at night?”
For a CISO, that question is maybe a bit of a nightmare in itself. It does not have one single answer; it has dozens. It’s the constant tension between enabling a globally distributed workforce to do their best work, and ensuring that "best work" does not inadvertently open the door to a catastrophic breach.
We often talk about the "zero trust journey," but the reality is that the journey is almost certainly paved with friction. If security is too cumbersome, users find creative (and dangerous) ways around it. If it’s seamless at the cost of effectiveness, it might not be secure enough to stop a determined adversary.
Today, we are excited to announce two new tools in Cloudflare’s SASE toolbox designed to modernize remote access by eliminating the "dark corners" of your network security without adding friction to the user experience: mandatory authentication and Cloudflare’s own multi-factor authentication (MFA).
When you deploy the Cloudflare One Client, you gain incredible visibility and control. You can apply Continue reading
Stop reacting to breaches and start preventing them with User Risk Scoring
Most security teams spend their days playing a high-stakes game of Whac-A-Mole. A user’s credentials get phished, or they accidentally download a malicious file, and suddenly you’re in incident response mode.
We built our SASE platform, Cloudflare One, to stop that cycle. By placing Access and Gateway in front of your applications and Internet traffic, we gave you the tools to decide who gets in and where they can go.
Today, we’re making those decisions smarter. You can now incorporate User Risk Scores directly into your zero trust network access (ZTNA) policies. Instead of just checking "Who is this user?" and "Is their device healthy?", you can now ask, "How has this user been behaving lately?" and adjust their access in real time.
For years, traditional corporate access was binary. You either had the right login and the right certificate, or you didn’t. But identity is fluid. A legitimate user can become a risk if their account is compromised or if they start exhibiting "insider threat" behaviors — like impossible travel, multiple failed login attempts, or triggering data loss prevention rules by moving sensitive data.
Cloudflare One now Continue reading
Moving from license plates to badges: the Gateway Authorization Proxy
We often talk about the "ideal" state, one where every device has a managed client like the Cloudflare One Client installed, providing deep visibility and seamless protection. However, reality often gets in the way.
Sometimes you are dealing with a company acquisition, managing virtual desktops, or working in a highly regulated environment where you simply cannot install software on an endpoint. You still need to protect that traffic, even when you don’t fully manage the device.
Closing this gap requires moving the identity challenge from the device to the network itself. By combining the browser’s native proxy capabilities with our global network, we can verify users and enforce granular policies on any device that can reach the Internet. We’ve built the Gateway Authorization Proxy and Proxy Auto-Configuration (PAC) File Hosting to automate this authentication and simplify how unmanaged devices connect to Cloudflare.
Back in 2022, we released proxy endpoints that allowed you to route traffic through Cloudflare to apply filtering rules. It solved the immediate need for access, but it had a significant "identity crisis."
Because that system relied on static IP addresses to identify users, it was a bit like a Continue reading
Defeating the deepfake: stopping laptop farms and insider threats
Trust is the most expensive vulnerability in modern security architecture. In recent years, the security industry has pivoted toward a zero trust model for networks — assuming breach and verifying every request. Yet when it comes to the people behind those requests, we often default back to implicit trust. We trust that the person on the Zoom call is who they say they are. We trust that the documents uploaded to an HR portal are genuine.
That trust is now being weaponized at an unprecedented scale.
In our 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report, we highlight a rapidly accelerating threat vector: the rise of "remote IT worker" fraud. Often linked to nation-states, including North Korea, these are not just individual bad actors. They are organized operations running laptop farms: warehouses of devices remotely accessed by workers using stolen identities to infiltrate companies, steal intellectual property (IP), and funnel revenue illicitly.
These attackers have evolved and continue to do so with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). They use generative AI to pass interviews and deepfake tools to fabricate flawless government IDs. Traditional background checks and standard identity providers (IdPs) are no longer enough. Bad actors are exploiting an identity assurance gap, Continue reading
Introducing the 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report
Today’s threat landscape is more varied and chilling than ever: Sophisticated nation-state actors. Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. Deepfakes and fraudsters interviewing at your company. Even stealth attacks via trusted internal tools like Google Calendar, Dropbox, and GitHub.
After spending the last year translating trillions of network signals into actionable intelligence, Cloudforce One has identified a fundamental evolution in the threat landscape: the era of brute force entry is fading. In its place is a model of high-trust exploitation that prioritizes results at all costs. In order to equip defenders with a strategic roadmap for this new era, today we are releasing the inaugural 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report. This report provides the intelligence organizations need to navigate the rise of industrialized cyber threats.
Cloudforce One has observed a broader shift in attacker psychology. To understand how these methods win, we have to look at the why behind them: the Measure of Effectiveness, or MOE.
In 2026, the modern adversary is trading the pursuit of "sophistication" (complex, expensive, one-off hacks) in favor of throughput. MOE is the metric attackers use to decide what to exploit next. It is a cold calculation of the Continue reading
Evolving Cloudflare’s Threat Intelligence Platform: actionable, scalable, and ETL-less
For years, the cybersecurity industry has suffered from a "data gravity" problem. Security teams are buried under billions of rows of telemetry, yet they remain starved for actionable insights.
A Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) is a centralized security system that collects, aggregates, and organizes data about known and emerging cyber threats. It serves as the vital connective tissue between raw telemetry and active defense.
The underlying architecture of Cloudflare’s Threat Intelligence Platform sets it apart from other solutions. We have evolved our Threat Intelligence Platform to eliminate the need for complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines by using a sharded, SQLite-backed architecture. By running GraphQL directly on the edge, security teams can now visualize and automate threat response in real time. Instead of one massive database, we distribute Threat Events across thousands of logical shards — meaning sub-second query latency, even when aggregating millions of events across global datasets.
By unifying our global telemetry with the manual investigations performed by our analysts, our intelligence platform creates a single source of truth that allows security teams to move from observing a threat to preemptively blocking it across the Cloudflare network. We believe your intelligence platform shouldn't just tell you that Continue reading
See risk, fix risk: introducing Remediation in Cloudflare CASB
Starting today, Cloudflare CASB customers can do more than see risky file-sharing across their SaaS apps: they can fix it, directly from the Cloudflare One dashboard.
This launch marks a huge advancement for Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). Since its release, Cloudflare’s API-based CASB has focused on providing robust, comprehensive visibility and detection. It also connects to the SaaS tools your business runs on, surfacing misconfigurations, and flagging overshared data before it becomes tomorrow’s incident.
With today’s release of Remediation – a new way to fix problems with just a click, right from the CASB Findings page – CASB begins its next chapter, and moves from telling you what’s wrong to helping you make it right.
An example of a Remediation Action (Remove Public File Sharing) in a CASB Finding.
Inside Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, CASB connects to the SaaS and cloud tools your teams already use. By talking to providers over API, CASB gives security and IT teams:
A consolidated view of misconfigurations, overshared files, and risky access patterns across apps like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Box, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence (CASB Integrations).