Exam time means Internet disruptions in Syria, Sudan and Algeria

It is once again exam time in Syria, Sudan, and Algeria, and with it, we find these countries disrupting Internet connectivity in an effort to prevent cheating on these exams. As they have done over the past several years, Syria and Sudan are implementing multi-hour nationwide Internet shutdowns. Algeria has also taken a similar approach in the past, but this year appears to be implementing more targeted website/application blocking.

Syria

Syria has been implementing Internet shutdowns across the country since 2011, but exam-related shutdowns have only been in place since 2016. In 2021, exams took place between May 31 and June 22, with multi-hour shutdowns observed on each of the exam days.

This year, the first shutdown was observed on May 30, with subsequent shutdowns (to date) seen on June 2, 6, and 12. In the Cloudflare Radar graph below, traffic for Syria drops to zero while the shutdowns are active. According to Internet Society Pulse, several additional shutdowns are expected through June 21. Each takes place between 02000530 UTC (0500–0830 local time). According to a published report, the current exam cycle covers more than 500,000 students for basic and general secondary education certificates.

Consistent with Continue reading

Cloudflare is redefining employee well-being in Japan

This post is also available in 日本語

“You can accomplish anything if you do it. Nothing will be accomplished unless you do it. If nothing is not accomplished, that’s because no one did it.“
— Yozan Uesugi

Long hours and hard work. If you ask anyone in Japan what our work culture is like, chances are, these are the words that will come to mind. Different countries have their own cultures and also specific work habits and ways of having a work-life balance. The pandemic brought everyone (companies and their people) a new reality, new lessons, and new habits. Here at Cloudflare, our thinking around where and how we do our best work has evolved over the course of the pandemic. We care about addressing the diverse needs of our workforce and our policies and benefits are designed to optimize for their flexibility and needs. To that end, Cloudflare Japan is making a few important changes to our employee benefits:

• “take what you need” time off for all our employees
• 16-week gender-neutral paid parental leave
• flexible working hours

First, let’s try to understand a bit of the Japanese work culture. According to Japan’s labor laws, Japanese employed workers are Continue reading

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.

The impact

Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.

It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.

In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn Continue reading

How Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee had an impact on the Internet

“I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”
— Queen Elizabeth II birthday speech, April 21, 1947

The rising and setting of the sun has an impact on human behaviour and on Internet trends, and events like this weekend's celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee also show up in Internet trends.

When Elizabeth II's reign started, on February 6, 1952 (the coronation was on June 2, 1953), the Turing machine had already been proposed (1936), and with that the basis for computer science. ARPANET, which became the technical foundation of the Internet, was still a dream that came to fruition in the late 60s — the World Wide Web is from 1989 and in 2014 we celebrated its Silver Jubilee. So, with that in mind, let’s answer the question: did the 2022 celebrations of the first British monarch with a 70th anniversary on the throne have an impact on the UK’s Internet traffic?

First, some details about the Platinum Jubilee. There was a four-day bank holiday (June 2-5) in the UK Continue reading

A new portal for Project Galileo participants

This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español and Português.

Each anniversary of Project Galileo serves as an impetus for big-picture thinking among the Cloudflare team about where to take the initiative next. For this eighth anniversary, we want to help participants get the most out of their free security and performance services and simplify the onboarding process.

Organizations protected under Galileo are a diverse bunch, with 111 countries represented across 1,900+ web domains. Some of these organizations are very small and sometimes operated solely by volunteers. It is understandable that many do not have IT specialists or other employees with technical knowledge about security and performance capabilities. We strive to give them the tools and training to succeed, and we felt it was imperative to take this effort to a new level.

Introducing the Cloudflare Social Impact Projects Portal

To provide Galileo participants with one place to access resources, configuration tips, product explainers, and more, we built the Cloudflare Social Impact Projects Portal.

The crisis in Ukraine was a key source of inspiration for this endeavor. With overall applications for the project skyrocketing by 177% in March 2022, we were rushing to onboard new Continue reading

Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

This post is also available in 日本語, Español.

Today we’re announcing Private Access Tokens, a completely invisible, private way to validate that real users are visiting your site. Visitors using operating systems that support these tokens, including the upcoming versions of macOS or iOS, can now prove they’re human without completing a CAPTCHA or giving up personal data. This will eliminate nearly 100% of CAPTCHAs served to these users.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re an Internet user:

• We’re making your mobile web experience more pleasant and more private than other networks at the same time.
• You won’t see a CAPTCHA on a supported iOS or Mac device (other devices coming soon!) accessing the Cloudflare network.

If you’re a web or application developer:

• Know your user is coming from an authentic device and signed application, verified by the device vendor directly.
• Validate users without maintaining a cumbersome SDK.

If you’re a Cloudflare customer:

• You don’t have to do anything!  Cloudflare will automatically ask for and utilize Private Access Tokens
• Your visitors won’t see a CAPTCHA, and we’ll ask for less data from their devices.

Introducing Private Access Tokens

Over the past year, Cloudflare has collaborated Continue reading

In Ukraine and beyond, what it takes to keep vulnerable groups online

This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español, Português.

As we celebrate the eighth anniversary of Project Galileo, we want to provide a view into the type of cyber attacks experienced by organizations protected under the project. In a year full of new challenges for so many, we hope that analysis of attacks against these vulnerable groups provides researchers, civil society, and targeted organizations with insight into how to better protect those working in these spaces.

For this blog, we want to focus on attacks we have seen against organizations in Ukraine, including significant growth in DDoS attack activity after the start of the conflict. Within the related Radar dashboard, we do a deep dive into attack trends against Project Galileo participants in a range of areas including human rights, journalism, and community led non-profits.

To read the whole report, visit the Project Galileo 8th anniversary Radar Dashboard.

Understanding the Data

• For this dashboard, we analyzed data from July 1, 2021 to May 5, 2022 from 1,900 organizations from around the world that are protected under the project.
• For DDoS attacks, we classify this as traffic that we have determined is part of a Continue reading

Let’s celebrate the 8th anniversary of Project Galileo!

This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español and Português.

We started Project Galileo in 2014 with the simple idea that organizations that work in vulnerable yet essential areas of human rights and democracy building should not be taken down because of cyber attacks. In the past eight years, this idea has grown to more than just keeping them secure from a DDoS attack, but also how to foster collaboration with civil society to offer more tools and support to these groups. In March 2022, after the war in Ukraine started, we saw an increase in applications to Project Galileo by 177%.

Read ahead for details on all of our eighth anniversary announcements:

• Two new civil society partners helping choose participants
• New insights on attack patterns using data from Cloudflare Radar
• A portal designed to ease onboarding for Galileo participants
• Details on our sessions at RightsCon this week
• New case studies highlighting Galileo participants and the important work they are doing

Announcing two new Project Galileo partners

This year, we are excited to welcome two new partners, International Media Support and CyberPeace Institute. As we introduce new partners, we are able to expand the project Continue reading

HTTP RFCs have evolved: A Cloudflare view of HTTP usage trends

Today, a cluster of Internet standards were published that rationalize and modernize the definition of HTTP - the application protocol that underpins the web. This work includes updates to, and refactoring of, HTTP semantics, HTTP caching, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and the brand-new HTTP/3. Developing these specifications has been no mean feat and today marks the culmination of efforts far and wide, in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and beyond. We thought it would be interesting to celebrate the occasion by sharing some analysis of Cloudflare's view of HTTP traffic over the last 12 months.

However, before we get into the traffic data, for quick reference, here are the new RFCs that you should make a note of and start using:

• HTTP Semantics - RFC 9110
  • HTTP's overall architecture, common terminology and shared protocol aspects such as request and response messages, methods, status codes, header and trailer fields, message content, representation data, content codings and much more. Obsoletes RFCs 2818, 7231, 7232, 7233, 7235, 7538, 7615, 7694, and portions of 7230.
• HTTP Caching - RFC 9111
  • HTTP caches and related header fields to control the behavior of response caching. Obsoletes RFC 7234.
• Continue reading

Cloudflare observations of Confluence zero day (CVE-2022-26134)

On 2022-06-02 at 20:00 UTC Atlassian released a Security Advisory relating to a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center products. This post covers our current analysis of this vulnerability.

When we learned about the vulnerability, Cloudflare’s internal teams immediately engaged to ensure all our customers and our own infrastructure were protected:

• Our Web Application Firewall (WAF) teams started work on our first mitigation rules that were deployed on 2022-06-02 at 23:38 UTC for all customers.
• Our internal security team started reviewing our Confluence instances to ensure Cloudflare itself was not impacted.

What is the impact of this vulnerability?

According to Volexity, the vulnerability results in full unauthenticated RCE, allowing an attacker to fully take over the target application.

Active exploits of this vulnerability leverage command injections using specially crafted strings to load a malicious class file in memory, allowing attackers to subsequently plant a webshell on the target machine that they can interact with.

Once the vulnerability is exploited, attackers can implant additional malicious code such as Behinder; a custom webshell called noop.jsp, which replaces the legitimate noop.jsp file located at Confluence root>/confluence/noop.jsp; and another open source webshell called Continue reading

Cloudflare customers are protected from the Atlassian Confluence CVE-2022-26134

On June 02, 2022 Atlassian released a security advisory for their Confluence Server and Data Center applications, highlighting a critical severity unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability. The vulnerability is as CVE-2022-26134 and affects Confluence Server version 7.18.0 and all Confluence Data Center versions >= 7.4.0.

No patch is available yet but Cloudflare customers using either WAF or Access are already protected.

Our own Confluence nodes are protected by both WAF and Access, and at the time of writing, we have found no evidence that our Confluence instance was exploited.

Cloudflare reviewed the security advisory, conducted our own analysis, and prepared a WAF mitigation rule via an emergency release. The rule, once tested, was deployed on June 2, 2022, at 23:38 UTC with a default action of BLOCK and the following IDs:

• 100531 (for our legacy WAF)
• 408cff2b  (for our new WAF)

All customers using the Cloudflare WAF to protect their self-hosted Confluence applications have automatically been protected since the new rule was deployed.

Customers who have deployed Cloudflare Access in front of their Confluence applications were protected from external exploitation attempts even before the emergency release. Access verifies every request made to a Confluence application to Continue reading

Platform Week wrap-up

A comprehensive developer platform includes all the necessary storage, compute, and services to effectively deliver an application. Compute that runs globally and auto-scales to execute code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure; storage for user information, objects, and key-value pairs; and all the related services including delivering video, optimizing images, managing third-party components, and capturing telemetry.

Whether you’re looking to modernize legacy backend infrastructure or are building a brand-new application from the ground up the Cloudflare Developer Platform provides all the building blocks you need to deliver an application on the edge.

Recently, during Platform Week, we made a number of announcements expanding what’s possible with the Developer Platform. Let’s take a look at some of the announcements we made and what this enables you to build. For a complete list visit the Platform Week hub.

Compute

The core of our compute offering is Workers, our serverless runtime. Workers integrates with other Cloudflare offerings helping you route requests, take action on bots, send an email, or route and filter emails, just to name a few.

There are times when you’ll want to use multiple Workers to perform an action, Workers now have the ability to call another Continue reading

“Much more than just writing.” How I got started as a content designer

Content design is a relatively new discipline, but one that deeply affects how users perceive, choose, and use products. People who work in content design can take many names (content designers, UX writers, product writers, just to name a few) but in a nutshell, our job is to help users accomplish goals on an interface by providing them with the right guidance at the right time. Unlike visual designers, content designers are not responsible for the graphic layout or the look and feel of a given interface — instead, we own what we call the conversation between product and user along each journey to ensure that the user has all the information they need to reach their goal.

The interesting thing is — when interfaces are concerned, the more effective the text, the less noticeable it will be to users. Great content on an interface “just works”; it disappears into a delightful user experience while leading happy users to success, whatever it is they’re trying to get done with a given product. Content designers achieve that by making sure they know user needs inside out and which problems the product is trying to solve. Next, in partnership with visual designers, Continue reading

We rebuilt Cloudflare’s developer documentation – here’s what we learned

We recently updated developers.cloudflare.com, the Cloudflare Developers documentation website, to a new version of our custom documentation engine. This change consisted of a significant migration from Gatsby to Hugo and converged a collection of Workers Sites into a single Cloudflare Pages instance. Together, these updates brought developer experience, performance, and quality of life improvements for our engineers, technical writers, and product managers.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the history of Cloudflare’s developer docs, why we made this recent transition, and why we continue to dogfood Cloudflare’s products as we develop applications internally.

What are Cloudflare’s Developer Docs?

Cloudflare’s Developer Docs, which are open source on GitHub, comprise documentation for all of Cloudflare’s products. The documentation is written by technical writers, product managers, and engineers at Cloudflare. Like many open source projects, contributions to the docs happen via Pull Requests (PRs). At time of writing, we have 1,600 documentation pages and have accepted almost 4,000 PRs, both from Cloudflare employees and external contributors in our community.

The underlying documentation engine we’ve used to build these docs has changed multiple times over the years. Documentation sites are often built with static site generators and, at Cloudflare, we’ve Continue reading

Cloudflare’s approach to handling BMC vulnerabilities

In recent years, management interfaces on servers like a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) have been the target of cyber attacks including ransomware, implants, and disruptive operations. Common BMC vulnerabilities like Pantsdown and USBAnywhere, combined with infrequent firmware updates, have left servers vulnerable.

We were recently informed from a trusted vendor of new, critical vulnerabilities in popular BMC software that we use in our fleet. Below is a summary of what was discovered, how we mitigated the impact, and how we look to prevent these types of vulnerabilities from having an impact on Cloudflare and our customers.

Background

A baseboard management controller is a small, specialized processor used for remote monitoring and management of a host system. This processor has multiple connections to the host system, giving it the ability to monitor hardware, update BIOS firmware, power cycle the host, and many more things.

Access to the BMC can be local or, in some cases, remote. With remote vectors open, there is potential for malware to be installed on the BMC from the local host via PCI Express or the Low Pin Count (LPC) interface. With compromised software on the BMC, malware or spyware could maintain persistence on the server.

Continue reading

How we treat content as a product

At Cloudflare, we talk a lot about how to help build a better Internet. On the Product Content Experience (PCX) team, we treat content like a product that represents and fulfills this mission. Our vision is to create world-class content that anticipates user needs and helps build accessible Cloudflare products. We believe we can impact the Cloudflare product experience and make it as wonderful as possible by intentionally designing, packaging, and testing the content.

What is “content like a product”?

I like taking on projects. A singular goal is met, and I clearly know I’m successful because the meaning of “done” is normally very clear. For example, I volunteer some of my time editing academic papers about technology. My role as an editor is temporary and there is a defined beginning and end to the work. I send my feedback and my task is largely complete.

“Content like a product” is when you shift your mindset from completing projects to maintaining a product, taking into consideration the user and their feedback. Product content at Cloudflare is an iterative, living, breathing thing. Inspired by the success of teams that adopt an agile mindset, along with some strategic functions you might find Continue reading

Dig through SERVFAILs with EDE

It can be frustrating to get errors (SERVFAIL response codes) returned from your DNS queries. It can be even more frustrating if you don’t get enough information to understand why the error is occurring or what to do next. That’s why back in 2020, we launched support for Extended DNS Error (EDE) Codes to 1.1.1.1.

As a quick refresher, EDE codes are a proposed IETF standard enabled by the Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS) spec. The codes return extra information about DNS or DNSSEC issues without touching the RCODE so that debugging is easier.

Now we’re happy to announce we will return more error code types and include additional helpful information to further improve your debugging experience. Let’s run through some examples of how these error codes can help you better understand the issues you may face.

To try for yourself, you’ll need to run the dig or kdig command in the terminal. For dig, please ensure you have v9.11.20 or above. If you are on macOS 12.1, by default you only have dig 9.10.6. Install an updated version of BIND to fix that.

Let’s start with the output of an example Continue reading

How we improved DNS record build speed by more than 4,000x

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Español.

Since my previous blog about Secondary DNS, Cloudflare's DNS traffic has more than doubled from 15.8 trillion DNS queries per month to 38.7 trillion. Our network now spans over 270 cities in over 100 countries, interconnecting with more than 10,000 networks globally. According to w3 stats, “Cloudflare is used as a DNS server provider by 15.3% of all the websites.” This means we have an enormous responsibility to serve DNS in the fastest and most reliable way possible.

Although the response time we have on DNS queries is the most important performance metric, there is another metric that sometimes goes unnoticed. DNS Record Propagation time is how long it takes changes submitted to our API to be reflected in our DNS query responses. Every millisecond counts here as it allows customers to quickly change configuration, making their systems much more agile. Although our DNS propagation pipeline was already known to be very fast, we had identified several improvements that, if implemented, would massively improve performance. In this blog post I’ll explain how we managed to drastically improve our DNS record propagation speed, and the Continue reading

Cloudflare Middle East & Turkey: a path to growth

This post is also available in عربي.

I am excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as Managing Director for the Middle East and Turkey (MET) region. Having worked in the domain of cyber security for more than two decades, I can see that Cloudflare is genuine in its mission of building a better Internet that is fast, safe and reliable for everyone. Being part of this journey that touches everyone’s life is surely an exciting thing to do, and I look forward to putting my experience in play towards successfully achieving this goal.

Cloudflare has been associated with delivering fast content over cloud in a most reliable and secure manner, accounting for at least 20% of the global Internet traffic. Cloudflare can cater for and support all types of organizations (businesses and public sector) including those with a social mission. The Middle East and Turkey as an emerging market is characterized by a relatively young population, with 70% of it being under the age of 30. This dynamic youth segment has an insatiable demand for both content and knowledge. To that extent, there has been a rapid uptake in Internet use, and digital transformation initiatives have significantly accelerated Continue reading

Cloudflare achieves key cloud computing certifications — and there’s more to come

This post is also available in French, German and Spanish.

Back in the early days of the Internet, you could physically see the hardware where your data was stored. You knew where your data was and what kind of locks and security protections you had in place. Fast-forward a few decades, and data is all “in the cloud”. Now, you have to trust that your cloud services provider is putting security precautions in place just as you would have if your data was still sitting on your hardware. The good news is, you don’t have to merely trust your provider anymore. There are a number of ways a cloud services provider can prove it has robust privacy and security protections in place.

Today, we are excited to announce that Cloudflare has taken three major steps forward in proving the security and privacy protections we provide to customers of our cloud services: we achieved a key cloud services certification, ISO/IEC 27018:2019; we completed our independent audit and received our Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalog (“C5”) attestation; and we have joined the EU Cloud Code of Conduct General Assembly to help increase the impact of the trusted cloud ecosystem and encourage Continue reading