Zhiyuan Zheng

Author Archives: Zhiyuan Zheng

Collect all your cookies in one jar with Page Shield Cookie Monitor

Cookies are small files of information that a web server generates and sends to a web browser. For example, a cookie stored in your browser will let a website know that you are already logged in, so instead of showing you a login page, you would be taken to your account page welcoming you back.

Though cookies are very useful, they are also used for tracking and advertising, sometimes with repercussions for user privacy. Cookies are a core tool, for example, for all advertising networks. To protect users, privacy laws may require website owners to clearly specify what cookies are being used and for what purposes, and, in many cases, to obtain a user's consent before storing those cookies in the user's browser. A key example of this is the ePrivacy Directive.

Herein lies the problem: often website administrators, developers, or compliance team members don’t know what cookies are being used by their website. A common approach for gaining a better understanding of cookie usage is to set up a scanner bot that crawls through each page, collecting cookies along the way. However, many websites requiring authentication or additional security measures do not allow for these scans, or require custom Continue reading

New! Security Analytics provides a comprehensive view across all your traffic

New! Security Analytics provides a comprehensive view across all your traffic
New! Security Analytics provides a comprehensive view across all your traffic

An application proxying traffic through Cloudflare benefits from a wide range of easy to use security features including WAF, Bot Management and DDoS mitigation. To understand if traffic has been blocked by Cloudflare we have built a powerful Security Events dashboard that allows you to examine any mitigation events. Application owners often wonder though what happened to the rest of their traffic. Did they block all traffic that was detected as malicious?

Today, along with our announcement of the WAF Attack Score, we are also launching our new Security Analytics.

Security Analytics gives you a security lens across all of your HTTP traffic, not only mitigated requests, allowing you to focus on what matters most: traffic deemed malicious but potentially not mitigated.

Detect then mitigate

Imagine you just onboarded your application to Cloudflare and without any additional effort, each HTTP request is analyzed by the Cloudflare network. Analytics are therefore enriched with attack analysis, bot analysis and any other security signal provided by Cloudflare.

Right away, without any risk of causing false positives, you can view the entirety of your traffic to explore what is happening, when and where.

This allows you to dive straight into analyzing the results Continue reading

A new WAF experience

A new WAF experience
A new WAF experience

Around three years ago, we brought multiple features into the Firewall tab in our dashboard navigation, with the motivation “to make our products and services intuitive.” With our hard work in expanding capabilities offerings in the past three years, we want to take another opportunity to evaluate the intuitiveness of Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall).

Our customers lead the way to new WAF

The security landscape is moving fast; types of web applications are growing rapidly; and within the industry there are various approaches to what a WAF includes and can offer. Cloudflare not only proxies enterprise applications, but also millions of personal blogs, community sites, and small businesses stores. The diversity of use cases are covered by various products we offer; however, these products are currently scattered and that makes visibility of active protection rules unclear. This pushes us to reflect on how we can best support our customers in getting the most value out of WAF by providing a clearer offering that meets expectations.

A few months ago, we reached out to our customers to answer a simple question: what do you consider to be part of WAF? We employed a range of user research methods including Continue reading