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).
From reactive to proactive: closing the phishing gap with LLMs
Email security has always been defined by impermanence. It is a perpetual call-and-response arms race, where defenses are only as strong as the last bypass discovered and attackers iterate relentlessly for even marginal gains. Every control we deploy eventually becomes yesterday’s solution.
What makes this challenge especially difficult is that our biggest weaknesses are, by definition, invisible.
This problem is best illustrated by a classic example from World War II. Mathematician Abraham Wald was tasked with helping Allied engineers decide where to reinforce bomber aircraft. Engineers initially focused on the bullet holes visible on planes returning from missions. Wald pointed out the flaw: they were reinforcing the areas where planes could already take damage and survive. The true vulnerabilities were on the planes that never came back.
Email security faces an identical hurdle: our detection gaps are unseen. By integrating LLMs, we advance email phishing protection and move from reactive to proactive detection improvement.
The limits of reactive defense
Traditional email security systems improve primarily through user-reported misses. For example, if we marked a spam message as clean, customers can send us the original EML to our pipelines for our analysts to analyze and update our models. This feedback loop Continue reading
How Cloudy translates complex security into human action
Today’s security ecosystem generates a staggering amount of complex telemetry. For instance, processing a single email requires analyzing sender reputation, authentication results, link behavior, infrastructure metadata, and countless other attributes. Simultaneously, Cloud access security broker (CASB) engines continuously scan SaaS environments for signals that detect misconfigurations, risky access, and exposed data.
But while detections have become more sophisticated, explanations have not always kept pace.
Security and IT teams are often aware when something is flagged, but they do not always know, at a glance, why. End users are asked to make real-time decisions about emails that may impact the entire organization, yet they are rarely given clear, contextual guidance in the moment that matters.
Cloudy changes that.
Cloudy is our LLM-powered explanation layer, built directly into Cloudflare One. It translates complex machine learning outputs into precise, human-readable guidance for security teams and end users alike. Instead of exposing raw technical signals, Cloudy surfaces the reasoning behind a detection in a way that drives informed action.
For Cloudflare Email Security, this means helping users understand why a message was flagged before they escalate it to the security operations center, or SOC. For Cloudflare CASB, it means helping administrators quickly understand Continue reading
The truly programmable SASE platform
Every organization approaches security through a unique lens, shaped by their tooling, requirements, and history. No two environments look the same, and none stay static for long. We believe the platforms that protect them shouldn't be static either.
Cloudflare built our global network to be programmable by design, so we can help organizations unlock this flexibility and freedom. In this post, we’ll go deeper into what programmability means, and how Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, helps customers architect their security and networking with our building blocks to meet their unique and custom needs.
The term programmability has become diluted by the industry. Most security vendors claim programmability because they have public APIs, documented Terraform providers, webhooks, and alerting. That’s great, and Cloudflare offers all of those things too.
These foundational capabilities provide customization, infrastructure-as-code, and security operations automation, but they're table stakes. With traditional programmability, you can configure a webhook to send an alert to Slack when a policy triggers.
But the true value of programmability is something different. It is the ability to intercept a security event, enrich it with external context, and act on it in real time. Say a user attempts to Continue reading
Beyond the blank slate: how Cloudflare accelerates your Zero Trust journey
In the world of cybersecurity, "starting from scratch" is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a clean slate; on the other, you face a mountain of configurations, best practices, and potential "gotchas."
While Cloudflare One has been often cited as one of the easiest-to-use SASE platforms, there is no magic without proper configuration. And while Cloudflare has been striving to simplify complex networking concepts by creating products such as Cloudflare WAN, Magic Transit, and Cloudflare Network Firewall, which simplify and reduce the typical complexity associated with deploying comparable functions from other vendors, the breadth of capabilities provided by Cloudflare One require creation of best-practice policies and templates to achieve the most optimal outcomes.
To make it easy to start taking advantage of Cloudflare’s powerful SASE platform, we have developed a method that ensures customers get the right configuration quickly and easily. We call it Project Helix.
In this post, we’ll dig into the problem of getting the correct customization, and how we built Project Helix to make it simple. That means our customers have access to the most powerful SASE platform out there — and the easiest to onboard.
The complexity barrier: Why Continue reading
Modernizing with agile SASE: a Cloudflare One blog takeover
Return to office has stalled for many, and the “new normal” for what the corporate network means is constantly changing. In 2026, your office may be a coffee shop, your workforce includes autonomous AI agents, and your perimeter is wherever the Internet reaches. This shift has forced a fundamental change in how we think about security, moving us toward a critical new architecture: agile SASE.
For too long, organizations have struggled under a 'fragmentation penalty,' juggling a patchwork of legacy hardware and Virtual Private Network (VPN) concentrators. These tools don't just require massive upfront investment; they create a mountain of technical debt — the cumulative cost of maintaining thousands of conflicting firewall rules, manual patches, and aging hardware that can’t support AI-scale traffic.
First-generation SASE providers promised a cure, but often just moved the mess to the cloud. By treating every data center as an isolated island, they’ve replaced hardware silos with operational silos. The result isn't a lack of visibility, but a lack of actionability: plenty of data, but no single way to enforce a consistent policy across a borderless enterprise.
Our customers have told us they need an agile and composable platform. This week, we are announcing Continue reading
Toxic combinations: when small signals add up to a security incident
At 3 AM, a single IP requested a login page. Harmless. But then, across several hosts and paths, the same source began appending ?debug=true — the sign of an attacker probing the environment to assess the technology stack and plan a breach.
Minor misconfigurations, overlooked firewall events, or request anomalies feel harmless on their own. But when these small signals converge, they can explode into security incidents known as “toxic combinations.” These are exploits where an attacker discovers and compounds many minor issues — such as a debug flag left on a web application or an unauthenticated application path — to breach systems or exfiltrate data.
Cloudflare’s network observes requests to your stack, and as a result, has the data to identify these toxic combinations as they form. In this post, we’ll show you how we surface these signals from our application security data. We’ll go over the most common types of toxic combinations and the dangerous vulnerabilities they present. We will also provide details on how you can use this intelligence to identify and address weaknesses in your stack.
You could define a "toxic combination" in a few different ways, but here Continue reading
ASPA: making Internet routing more secure
Internet traffic relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to find its way between networks. However, this traffic can sometimes be misdirected due to configuration errors or malicious actions. When traffic is routed through networks it was not intended to pass through, it is known as a route leak. We have written on our blog multiple times about BGP route leaks and the impact they have on Internet routing, and a few times we have even alluded to a future of path verification in BGP.
While the network community has made significant progress in verifying the final destination of Internet traffic, securing the actual path it takes to get there remains a key challenge for maintaining a reliable Internet. To address this, the industry is adopting a new cryptographic standard called ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization), which is designed to validate the entire path of network traffic and prevent route leaks.
To help the community track the rollout of this standard, Cloudflare Radar has introduced a new ASPA deployment monitoring feature. This view allows users to observe ASPA adoption trends over time across the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), and view ASPA records and changes over time Continue reading
Bringing more transparency to post-quantum usage, encrypted messaging, and routing security
Cloudflare Radar already offers a wide array of security insights — from application and network layer attacks, to malicious email messages, to digital certificates and Internet routing.
And today we’re introducing even more. We are launching several new security-related data sets and tools on Radar:
We are extending our post-quantum (PQ) monitoring beyond the client side to now include origin-facing connections. We have also released a new tool to help you check any website's post-quantum encryption compatibility.
A new Key Transparency section on Radar provides a public dashboard showing the real-time verification status of Key Transparency Logs for end-to-end encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, showing when each log was last signed and verified by Cloudflare's Auditor. The page serves as a transparent interface where anyone can monitor the integrity of public key distribution and access the API to independently validate our Auditor’s proofs.
Routing Security insights continue to expand with the addition of global, country, and network-level information about the deployment of ASPA, an emerging standard that can help detect and prevent BGP route leaks.
Since April 2024, we have tracked the aggregate growth of client support for post-quantum encryption on Cloudflare Continue reading
The most-seen UI on the Internet? Redesigning Turnstile and Challenge Pages
You've seen it. Maybe you didn't register it consciously, but you've seen it. That little widget asking you to verify you're human. That full-page security check before accessing a website. If you've spent any time on the Internet, you've encountered Cloudflare's Turnstile widget or Challenge Pages — likely more times than you can count.
The Turnstile widget – a familiar sight across millions of websites
When we say that a large portion of the Internet sits behind Cloudflare, we mean it. Our Turnstile widget and Challenge Pages are served 7.67 billion times every single day. That's not a typo. Billions. This might just be the most-seen user interface on the Internet.
And that comes with enormous responsibility.
Designing a product with billions of eyeballs on it isn't just challenging — it requires a fundamentally different approach. Every pixel, every word, every interaction has to work for someone's grandmother in rural Japan, a teenager in São Paulo, a visually impaired developer in Berlin, and a busy executive in Lagos. All at the same time. In moments of frustration.
Today we’re sharing the story of how we redesigned Turnstile and Challenge Pages. It's a story told in three parts, by three Continue reading
We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript
Handling data in streams is fundamental to how we build applications. To make streaming work everywhere, the WHATWG Streams Standard (informally known as "Web streams") was designed to establish a common API to work across browsers and servers. It shipped in browsers, was adopted by Cloudflare Workers, Node.js, Deno, and Bun, and became the foundation for APIs like fetch(). It's a significant undertaking, and the people who designed it were solving hard problems with the constraints and tools they had at the time.
But after years of building on Web streams — implementing them in both Node.js and Cloudflare Workers, debugging production issues for customers and runtimes, and helping developers work through far too many common pitfalls — I've come to believe that the standard API has fundamental usability and performance issues that cannot be fixed easily with incremental improvements alone. The problems aren't bugs; they're consequences of design decisions that may have made sense a decade ago, but don't align with how JavaScript developers write code today.
This post explores some of the fundamental issues I see with Web streams and presents an alternative approach built around JavaScript language primitives that demonstrate something better is possible.
How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
*This post was updated at 12:35 pm PT to fix a typo in the build time benchmarks.
Last week, one engineer and an AI model rebuilt the most popular front-end framework from scratch. The result, vinext (pronounced "vee-next"), is a drop-in replacement for Next.js, built on Vite, that deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command. In early benchmarks, it builds production apps up to 4x faster and produces client bundles up to 57% smaller. And we already have customers running it in production.
The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens.
Next.js is the most popular React framework. Millions of developers use it. It powers a huge chunk of the production web, and for good reason. The developer experience is top-notch.
But Next.js has a deployment problem when used in the broader serverless ecosystem. The tooling is entirely bespoke: Next.js has invested heavily in Turbopack but if you want to deploy it to Cloudflare, Netlify, or AWS Lambda, you have to take that build output and reshape it into something the target platform can actually run.
If you’re thinking: “Isn’t that what OpenNext does?”, you are correct. Continue reading
Cloudflare One is the first SASE offering modern post-quantum encryption across the full platform
During Security Week 2025, we launched the industry’s first cloud-native post-quantum Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Zero Trust solution, a major step towards securing enterprise network traffic sent from end user devices to public and private networks.
But this is only part of the equation. To truly secure the future of enterprise networking, you need a complete Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).
Today, we complete the equation: Cloudflare One is the first SASE platform to support modern standards-compliant post-quantum (PQ) encryption in our Secure Web Gateway, and across Zero Trust and Wide Area Network (WAN) use cases. More specifically, Cloudflare One now offers post-quantum hybrid ML-KEM (Module-Lattice-based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism) across all major on-ramps and off-ramps.
To complete the equation, we added support for post-quantum encryption to our Cloudflare IPsec (our cloud-native WAN-as-a-Service) and Cloudflare One Appliance (our physical or virtual WAN appliance that establish Cloudflare IPsec connections). Cloudflare IPsec uses the IPsec protocol to establish encrypted tunnels from a customer’s network to Cloudflare’s global network, while IP Anycast is used to automatically route that tunnel to the nearest Cloudflare data center. Cloudflare IPsec simplifies configuration and provides high availability; if a specific data center becomes unavailable, traffic Continue reading
Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
On February 20, 2026, at 17:48 UTC, Cloudflare experienced a service outage when a subset of customers who use Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) service saw their routes to the Internet withdrawn via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack or malicious activity of any kind. This issue was caused by a change that Cloudflare made to how our network manages IP addresses onboarded through the BYOIP pipeline. This change caused Cloudflare to unintentionally withdraw customer prefixes.
For some BYOIP customers, this resulted in their services and applications being unreachable from the Internet, causing timeouts and failures to connect across their Cloudflare deployments that used BYOIP. The website for Cloudflare’s recursive DNS resolver (1.1.1.1) saw 403 errors as well. The total duration of the incident was 6 hours and 7 minutes with most of that time spent restoring prefix configurations to their state prior to the change.
Cloudflare engineers reverted the change and prefixes stopped being withdrawn when we began to observe failures. However, before engineers were able to revert the change, ~1,100 BYOIP prefixes were withdrawn from the Cloudflare network. Some customers were able to restore their Continue reading
Code Mode: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens
Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the standard way for AI agents to use external tools. But there is a tension at its core: agents need many tools to do useful work, yet every tool added fills the model's context window, leaving less room for the actual task.
Code Mode is a technique we first introduced for reducing context window usage during agent tool use. Instead of describing every operation as a separate tool, let the model write code against a typed SDK and execute the code safely in a Dynamic Worker Loader. The code acts as a compact plan. The model can explore tool operations, compose multiple calls, and return just the data it needs. Anthropic independently explored the same pattern in their Code Execution with MCP post.
Today we are introducing a new MCP server for the entire Cloudflare API — from DNS and Zero Trust to Workers and R2 — that uses Code Mode. With just two tools, search() and execute(), the server is able to provide access to the entire Cloudflare API over MCP, while consuming only around 1,000 tokens. The footprint stays fixed, no matter how many API endpoints exist.
For a large API like Continue reading
Shedding old code with ecdysis: graceful restarts for Rust services at Cloudflare
ecdysis | ˈekdəsəs |
noun
the process of shedding the old skin (in reptiles) or casting off the outer cuticle (in insects and other arthropods).
How do you upgrade a network service, handling millions of requests per second around the globe, without disrupting even a single connection?
One of our solutions at Cloudflare to this massive challenge has long been ecdysis, a Rust library that implements graceful process restarts where no live connections are dropped, and no new connections are refused.
Last month, we open-sourced ecdysis, so now anyone can use it. After five years of production use at Cloudflare, ecdysis has proven itself by enabling zero-downtime upgrades across our critical Rust infrastructure, saving millions of requests with every restart across Cloudflare’s global network.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of getting these upgrades right, especially at the scale of Cloudflare’s network. Many of our services perform critical tasks such as traffic routing, TLS lifecycle management, or firewall rules enforcement, and must operate continuously. If one of these services goes down, even for an instant, the cascading impact can be catastrophic. Dropped connections and failed requests quickly lead to degraded customer performance and business impact.
When Continue reading
Introducing Markdown for Agents
The way content and businesses are discovered online is changing rapidly. In the past, traffic originated from traditional search engines, and SEO determined who got found first. Now the traffic is increasingly coming from AI crawlers and agents that demand structured data within the often-unstructured Web that was built for humans.
As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens.
Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside. A simple ## About Us on a page in markdown costs roughly 3 tokens; its HTML equivalent – <h2 class="section-title" id="about">About Us</h2> – burns 12-15, and that's before you account for the <div> wrappers, nav bars, and script tags that pad every real web page and have zero semantic value.
This blog post you’re reading takes 16,180 tokens in HTML and 3,150 tokens when converted to markdown. That’s a 80% reduction in token usage.
Markdown has quickly become the lingua franca for agents and AI systems as a whole. The format’s explicit structure Continue reading
2025 Q4 DDoS threat report: A record-setting 31.4 Tbps attack caps a year of massive DDoS assaults
Welcome to the 24th edition of Cloudflare’s Quarterly DDoS Threat Report. In this report, Cloudforce One offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network. In this edition, we focus on the fourth quarter of 2025, as well as share overall 2025 data.
The fourth quarter of 2025 was characterized by an unprecedented bombardment launched by the Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet, dubbed “The Night Before Christmas" DDoS attack campaign. The campaign targeted Cloudflare customers as well as Cloudflare’s dashboard and infrastructure with hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks exceeding rates of 200 million requests per second (rps), just weeks after a record-breaking 31.4 Terabits per second (Tbps) attack.
DDoS attacks surged by 121% in 2025, reaching an average of 5,376 attacks automatically mitigated every hour.
In the final quarter of 2025, Hong Kong jumped 12 places, making it the second most DDoS’d place on earth. The United Kingdom also leapt by an astonishing 36 places, making it the sixth most-attacked place.
Infected Android TVs — part of the Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet — bombarded Cloudflare’s network with hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks, while Telcos emerged as the most-attacked industry.