Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz

Author Archives: Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz

Introducing Cloudflare Security Center

Introducing Cloudflare Security Center
Introducing Cloudflare Security Center

Today we are launching Cloudflare Security Center, which brings together our suite of security products, our security expertise, and unique Internet intelligence as a unified security intelligence solution.

Cloudflare was launched in 2009 to help build a better Internet and make Internet performance and security accessible to everyone. Over the last twelve years, we’ve disrupted the security industry and launched a broad range of products to address our customer’s pain points across Application Security, Network Security, and Enterprise Security.

While there are a plethora of solutions on the market to solve specific pain points, we’ve architected Cloudflare One as a unified platform to holistically address our customers’ most pressing security challenges.  As part of this vision, we are extremely excited to launch the public beta of Security Center. Our goal is to help customers understand their attack surface and quickly take action to reduce their risk of an incident.

Starting today, all Cloudflare users can use Security Center (available in your Cloudflare dashboard) to map their attack surface, review potential security risks and threats to their organizations, and mitigate these risks with a few clicks.

The changing corporate attack surface

A year ago, we announced Cloudflare One to address Continue reading

Announcing antivirus in Cloudflare Gateway

Announcing antivirus in Cloudflare Gateway

Today we’re announcing support for malware detection and prevention directly from the Cloudflare edge, giving Gateway users an additional line of defense against security threats.

Cloudflare Gateway protects employees and data from threats on the Internet, and it does so without sacrificing performance for security. Instead of backhauling traffic to a central location, Gateway customers connect to one of Cloudflare’s data centers in 200 cities around the world where our network can apply content and security policies to protect their Internet-bound traffic.

Announcing antivirus in Cloudflare Gateway

Last year, Gateway expanded from a secure DNS filtering solution to a full Secure Web Gateway capable of protecting every user’s HTTP traffic as well. This enables admins to detect and block not only threats at the DNS layer, but malicious URLs and undesired file types as well. Moreover, admins now have the ability to create high-impact, company-wide policies that protect all users with one click, or they can create more granular rules based on user identity.

Earlier this month, we launched application policies in Cloudflare Gateway to make it easier for administrators to block specific web applications. With this feature, administrators can block those applications commonly used to distribute malware, such as public cloud file storage.

These Continue reading

Control web applications with two-clicks in Cloudflare Gateway

Control web applications with two-clicks in Cloudflare Gateway
Control web applications with two-clicks in Cloudflare Gateway

Nearly a year ago, we announced Cloudflare for Teams, Cloudflare’s platform for securing users, devices, and data. With Cloudflare for Teams, our global network becomes your team’s network, replacing on-premise appliances and security subscriptions with a single solution delivered closer to your users — wherever they work. Cloudflare for Teams centers around two core products: Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway.

Cloudflare Gateway protects employees from security threats on the Internet and enforces appropriate use policies. We built Gateway to help customers replace the pain of backhauling user traffic through centralized firewalls. With Gateway, users instead connect to one of Cloudflare’s data centers in 200 cities around the world where our network can apply consistent security policies for all of their Internet traffic.

Control web applications with two-clicks in Cloudflare Gateway

In March 2020, we launched Gateway’s first feature, a secure DNS filtering solution. With Gateway’s DNS filtering, administrators can click a single button to block known threats, like sources of malware or phishing sites. Policies can also be used to block specific risky categories, like gambling or social media. When users request a filtered site, Gateway stops the DNS query from resolving and prevents the device from connecting to a malicious destination or hostname with blocked material.

Continue reading

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise
Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

On Sunday, December 13, FireEye released a report on a sophisticated supply chain attack leveraging SolarWinds' Orion IT monitoring software. The malware was distributed as part of regular updates to Orion and had a valid digital signature.

One of the notable features of the malware is the way it hides its network traffic using a multi-staged approach. First, the malware determines its command and control (C2) server using a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to construct and resolve a subdomain of avsvmcloud[.]com.

These algorithmically generated strings are added as a subdomain of one of the following domain names to create a new fully-qualified domain name to resolve:

.appsync-api[.]eu-west-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com
.appsync-api[.]us-west-2[.]avsvmcloud[.]com
.appsync-api[.]us-east-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com
.appsync-api[.]us-east-2[.]avsvmcloud[.]com

An example of such a domain name might look like: hig4gcdkgjkrt24v6isue7ax09nksd[.]appsync-api[.]eu-west-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com

The DNS query response to a subdomain of one of the above will return a CNAME record that points to another C2 domain, which is used for data exfiltration. The following subdomains were identified as the C2 domains used for data exfiltration:

freescanonline[.]com
deftsecurity[.]com
thedoccloud[.]com
websitetheme[.]com
highdatabase[.]com
incomeupdate[.]com
databasegalore[.]com
panhardware[.]com
zupertech[.]com
virtualdataserver[.]com
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Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

Introducing Cloudflare One Intel
Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

Earlier this week, we announced Cloudflare One, a single platform for networking and security management. Cloudflare One extends the speed, reliability, and security we’ve brought to Internet properties and applications over the last decade to make the Internet the new enterprise WAN.

Underpinning Cloudflare One is Cloudflare’s global network - today, our network spans more than 200 cities worldwide and is within milliseconds of nearly everyone connected to the Internet. Our network handles, on average, 18 million HTTP requests and 6 million DNS requests per second. With 1 billion unique IP addresses connecting to the Cloudflare network each day, we have one of the broadest views on Internet activity worldwide.

We see a large diversity of Internet traffic across our entire product suite. Every day, we block 72 billion cyberthreats. This visibility provides us with a unique position to understand and mitigate Internet threats, and enables us to see new threats and malware before anyone else.

At the beginning of this month, as part of our 10th Birthday Week, we launched Cloudflare Radar, which shares high-level trends with the general public based on our network’s aggregate data. The same data that powers that view of the Internet also Continue reading