Optimizing Your Cybersecurity Budget
Strong cybersecurity comes at a price. The exact amount depends on your risk tolerance.Cloudflare announces partnerships with leading cyber insurers and incident response providers
We are excited to announce our cyber risk partnership program with leading cyber insurance carriers and incident response providers to help our customers reduce their cyber risk. Cloudflare customers can qualify for discounts on premiums or enhanced coverage with our partners. Additionally, our incident response partners are partnering with us for mitigating under attack scenarios in an accelerated manner.
What is a business’ cyber risk?
Let's start with security and insurance — e.g., being a homeowner is an adventure and a responsibility. You personalize your home, maintain it, and make it secure against the slightest possibility of intrusion — fence it up, lock the doors, install a state of the art security system, and so on. These measures definitely reduce the probability of an intrusion, but you still buy insurance. Why? To cover for the rare possibility that something might go wrong — human errors, like leaving the garage door open, or unlikely events, like a fire, hurricane etc. And when something does go wrong, you call the experts (aka police) to investigate and respond to the situation.
Running a business that has any sort of online presence is evolving along the same lines. Getting the right Continue reading
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
Shadow IT: make it easy for users to follow the rules
SaaS application usage has exploded over the last decade. According to Gartner, global spending on SaaS in 2021 was $145bn and is forecasted to reach $171bn in 2022. A key benefit of SaaS applications is that they are easy to get started with and either free or low cost. This is great for both users and leaders — it’s easy to try out new tools with no commitment or procurement process. But this convenience also presents a challenge to CIOs and security teams. Many SaaS applications are great for a specific task, but lack required security controls or visibility. It can be easy for employees to start using SaaS applications for their everyday job without IT teams noticing — these “unapproved” applications are popularly referred to as Shadow IT.
CIOs often have no visibility over what applications their SaaS employees are using. Even when they do, they may not have an easy way to block users from using unapproved applications, or on the contrary, to provide easy access to approved ones.
Visibility into application usage
In an office, it was easier for CIOs and their teams to monitor application usage in their organization. Mechanisms existed to inspect outbound DNS Continue reading
How to customize your layer 3/4 DDoS protection settings
After initially providing our customers control over the HTTP-layer DDoS protection settings earlier this year, we’re now excited to extend the control our customers have to the packet layer. Using these new controls, Cloudflare Enterprise customers using the Magic Transit and Spectrum services can now tune and tweak their L3/4 DDoS protection settings directly from the Cloudflare dashboard or via the Cloudflare API.
The new functionality provides customers control over two main DDoS rulesets:
- Network-layer DDoS Protection ruleset — This ruleset includes rules to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks on layer 3/4 of the OSI model such as UDP floods, SYN-ACK reflection attacks, SYN Floods, and DNS floods. This ruleset is available for Spectrum and Magic Transit customers on the Enterprise plan.
- Advanced TCP Protection ruleset — This ruleset includes rules to detect and mitigate sophisticated out-of-state TCP attacks such as spoofed ACK Floods, Randomized SYN Floods, and distributed SYN-ACK Reflection attacks. This ruleset is available for Magic Transit customers only.
To learn more, review our DDoS Managed Ruleset developer documentation. We’ve put together a few guides that we hope will be helpful for you:
Magic Firewall gets Smarter
Today, we're very excited to announce a set of updates to Magic Firewall, adding security and visibility features that are key in modern cloud firewalls. To improve security, we’re adding threat intel integration and geo-blocking. For visibility, we’re adding packet captures at the edge, a way to see packets arrive at the edge in near real-time.
Magic Firewall is our network-level firewall which is delivered through Cloudflare to secure your enterprise. Magic Firewall covers your remote users, branch offices, data centers and cloud infrastructure. Best of all, it’s deeply integrated with Cloudflare, giving you a one-stop overview of everything that’s happening on your network.
A brief history of firewalls
We talked a lot about firewalls on Monday, including how our firewall-as-a-service solution is very different from traditional firewalls and helps security teams that want sophisticated inspections at the Application Layer. When we talk about the Application Layer, we’re referring to OSI Layer 7. This means we’re applying security features using semantics of the protocol. The most common example is HTTP, the protocol you’re using to visit this website. We have Gateway and our WAF to protect inbound and outbound HTTP requests, but what about Layer 3 and Layer 4 Continue reading
Response: Hardware Differences between Routers and Switches
Dmytro Shypovalov sent me his views on the hardware differences between routers and switches. Enjoy!
So, a long time ago routers were L3 with CPU forwarding and switches were L2 with ASIC. Then they had invented TCAM and L3 switches, and since then ASICs have evolved to support more features (QoS, encapsulations etc) and store more routes, while CPU-based architectures have evolved to specialised NPU and parallel processing (e.g. Cisco QFX) to handle more traffic, while supporting all features of CPU forwarding.
Response: Hardware Differences between Routers and Switches
Dmytro Shypovalov sent me his views on the hardware differences between routers and switches. Enjoy!
So, a long time ago routers were L3 with CPU forwarding and switches were L2 with ASIC. Then they had invented TCAM and L3 switches, and since then ASICs have evolved to support more features (QoS, encapsulations etc) and store more routes, while CPU-based architectures have evolved to specialised NPU and parallel processing (e.g. Cisco QFX) to handle more traffic, while supporting all features of CPU forwarding.
Day Two Cloud 127: Avoiding Infrastructure As Code (IaC) Pitfalls
There are a lot of good things you can do with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for automation, repeatability, and ease of operations and development. But there are also code and infrastructure pitfalls where you can tumble into a hole, break your leg, and get eaten by spiders. OK, maybe not that bad, but on today's episode we talk about potential IaC pitfalls and how to avoid them with guest Tim Davis.
The post Day Two Cloud 127: Avoiding Infrastructure As Code (IaC) Pitfalls appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 127: Avoiding Infrastructure As Code (IaC) Pitfalls
There are a lot of good things you can do with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for automation, repeatability, and ease of operations and development. But there are also code and infrastructure pitfalls where you can tumble into a hole, break your leg, and get eaten by spiders. OK, maybe not that bad, but on today's episode we talk about potential IaC pitfalls and how to avoid them with guest Tim Davis.Why Cloudflare Bought Zaraz
Today we're excited to announce that Cloudflare has acquired Zaraz. The Zaraz value proposition aligns with Cloudflare's mission. They aim to make the web more secure, more reliable, and faster. And they built their solution on Cloudflare Workers. In other words, it was a no-brainer that we invite them to join our team.
Be Careful Who Takes Out the Trash
To understand Zaraz's value proposition, you need to understand one of the biggest risks to most websites that people aren't paying enough attention to. And, to understand that, let me use an analogy.
Imagine you run a business. Imagine that business is, I don't know, a pharmacy. You have employees. They have a process and way they do things. They're under contract, and you conduct background checks before you hire them. They do their jobs well and you trust them. One day, however, you realize that no one is emptying the trash. So you ask your team to find someone to empty the trash regularly.
Your team is busy and no one has the time to add this to their regular duties. But one plucky employee has an idea. He goes out on the street and hails down a relative Continue reading
Cloudflare acquires Zaraz to enable cloud loading of third-party tools
We are excited to announce the acquisition of Zaraz by Cloudflare, and the launch of Cloudflare Zaraz (beta). What we are releasing today is a beta version of the Zaraz product integrated into Cloudflare’s systems and dashboard. You can use it to manage and load third-party tools on the cloud, and achieve significant speed, privacy and security improvements. We have bet on Workers, and the Cloudflare technology and network from day one, and therefore are particularly excited to be offering Zaraz to all of Cloudflare's customers today, free of charge. If you are a Cloudflare customer all you need to do is to click the Zaraz icon on the dashboard, and start configuring your third-party stack. No code changes are needed. We plan to keep releasing features in the next couple of months until this beta version is a fully-developed product offering.
It’s time to say goodbye to traditional Tag Managers and Customer Data Platforms. They have done their part, and they have done it well, but as the web evolves they have also created some crucial problems. We are here to solve that.
The problems of third-party bloat
Yo'av and I founded Zaraz after having experienced working on opposite Continue reading
Guest Blog: k8s tunnels with Kudelski Security
Today, we’re excited to publish a blog post written by our friends at Kudelski Security, a managed security services provider. A few weeks back, Romain Aviolat, the Principal Cloud and Security Engineer at Kudelski Security approached our Zero Trust team with a unique solution to a difficult problem that was powered by Cloudflare’s Identity-aware Proxy, which we call Cloudflare Tunnel, to ensure secure application access in remote working environments.
We enjoyed learning about their solution so much that we wanted to amplify their story. In particular, we appreciated how Kudelski Security’s engineers took full advantage of the flexibility and scalability of our technology to automate workflows for their end users. If you’re interested in learning more about Kudelski Security, check out their work below or their research blog.
Zero Trust Access to Kubernetes
Over the past few years, Kudelski Security’s engineering team has prioritized migrating our infrastructure to multi-cloud environments. Our internal cloud migration mirrors what our end clients are pursuing and has equipped us with expertise and tooling to enhance our services for them. Moreover, this transition has provided us an opportunity to reimagine our own security approach and embrace the best practices of Zero Trust.
So far, one Continue reading