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DDoS attack trends for 2021 Q1

DDoS attack trends for 2021 Q1
DDoS attack trends for 2021 Q1

Last week was Developer Week at Cloudflare. During that week, our teams released a bunch of cool new products, including a bunch of improvements to Workers. And it's not just our customers that love deploying apps with Workers, but also our engineering teams. Workers is also what powers our Internet traffic and attack trends on Cloudflare Radar. Today, along with this deep-dive analysis blog, we’re excited to announce the new Radar DDoS Report page, our first fully automated data notebook built on top of Jupyter, Clickhouse, and Workers.

Last month, we introduced our autonomous edge DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection system and explained how it is able to drop attacks at wire speed without impacting performance. It runs in our networks’ edge, analyzes traffic asynchronously to avoid impacting performance, and pushes mitigation rules in-line immediately once attacks are detected. All of this is done autonomously, i.e., without requiring centralized consensus.

Today, we’d like to share the latest DDoS insights and trends that are based on attacks that our system mitigated during the first quarter of 2021. When we analyze attacks, we calculate the “DDoS activity” rate, which is the percent of attack traffic out of Continue reading

Starting Network Automation for Non-Programmers

The reader asking about infrastructure-as-code in public cloud deployments also wondered whether he has any chance at mastering on-premises network automation due to lack of programming skills.

I am starting to get concerned about not knowing automation, IaC, or any programming language. I didn’t go to college, like a lot of my peers did, and they have some background in programming.

First of all, thanks a million to everyone needs to become a programmer hipsters for thoroughly confusing people. Now for a tiny bit of reality.

Starting Network Automation for Non-Programmers

The reader asking about infrastructure-as-code in public cloud deployments also wondered whether he has any chance at mastering on-premises network automation due to lack of programming skills.

I am starting to get concerned about not knowing automation, IaC, or any programming language. I didn’t go to college, like a lot of my peers did, and they have some background in programming.

First of all, thanks a million to everyone needs to become a programmer hipsters for thoroughly confusing people. Now for a tiny bit of reality.

Entwicklung der DDoS-Bedrohungslandschaft im ersten Quartal 2021

Entwicklung der DDoS-Bedrohungslandschaft im ersten Quartal 2021
Entwicklung der DDoS-Bedrohungslandschaft im ersten Quartal 2021

Letzte Woche fand die Cloudflare Developer Week statt – ein willkommener Anlass für unsere Teams, eine Reihe von spannenden neuen Produkten und nicht zuletzt auch einige Verbesserungen für Workers vorzustellen. Die Qualitäten dieser Lösung für den Einsatz von Applikationen wissen übrigens nicht nur unsere Kunden zu schätzen: Das Tool erfreut sich auch bei unseren eigenen Entwicklern großer Beliebtheit. Unter anderem basiert auch unsere Untersuchung von Internet- und Bedrohungstrends mithilfe von Cloudflare Radar auf Workers. Wir freuen uns, dass wir Ihnen heute (zusätzlich zu diesem Blogbeitrag mit detaillierten Analysen zu diesem Thema) unseren neuen Radar DDoS Report präsentieren können, unser erstes komplett automatisiertes Daten-Notebook auf der Grundlage von Jupyter, Clickhouse und Workers.

Letzten Monat stellten wir unser autonomes, am Netzwerkrand (Edge) betriebenes Schutzsystem gegen DDoS-Angriffe (Distributed Denial of Service) vor und erläuterten, wie es mit dieser Lösung gelingen kann, Attacken verzögerungsfrei und ohne Performance-Einbußen abzuwehren. Dieses System vermeidet Leistungsabfälle durch eine asynchrone Analyse des Datenverkehrs und leitet bei Angriffen sofort und direkt im Datenstrom Gegenmaßnahmen ein. All dies geschieht autonom am Netzwerkrand, eine separate Prüfung über eine zentrale Stelle ist nicht nötig.

Heute möchten wir Sie nun auf der Grundlage der Angriffe, die unsere Systeme im ersten Quartal 2021 abwehren Continue reading

GKE Tip series

Kubernetes is the defacto Container orchestration platform today and GKE is a managed Kubernetes distribution from GCP. In addition to being best-in-class Kubernetes distribution, GKE adds all the goodness of GCP to GKE and is also integrated well with the cloud native ecosystem. GKE has been in general availability for the last 5+ years and … Continue reading GKE Tip series

Cloudflare’s Partnership with HashiCorp and Bootstrapping Terraform with Cf-Terraforming

Cloudflare’s Partnership with HashiCorp and Bootstrapping Terraform with Cf-Terraforming
Cloudflare’s Partnership with HashiCorp and Bootstrapping Terraform with Cf-Terraforming

Cloudflare and HashiCorp have been technology partners since 2018, and in that time Cloudflare’s integration with HashiCorp’s technology has deepened, especially with Terraform, HashiCorp’s infrastructure-as-code product. Today we are announcing a major update to our Terraform bootstrapping tool, cf-terraforming. In this blog, I recap the history of our partnership, the HashiCorp Terraform Verified Provider for Cloudflare, and how getting started with Terraform for Cloudflare developers is easier than ever before with the new version of cf-terraforming.

Cloudflare and HashiCorp

Members of the open source community wrote and supported the first version of Cloudflare's Terraform provider. Eventually our customers began to bring up Terraform in conversations more often. Because of customer demand, we started supporting and developing the Terraform provider ourselves. You can read the initial v1.0 announcement for the provider here. Soon after, Cloudflare’s Terraform provider became ‘verified’ and we began working with HashiCorp to provide a high quality experience for developers.

HashiCorp Terraform allows developers to control their infrastructure-as-code through a standard configuration language, HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). It works across a myriad of different types of infrastructure including cloud service providers, containers, virtual machines, bare metal, etc. Terraform makes it easy for developers to follow Continue reading

Containers at the edge: it’s not what you think, or maybe it is

Containers at the edge: it’s not what you think, or maybe it is
Containers at the edge: it’s not what you think, or maybe it is

At Cloudflare, we’re committed to making it as easy as possible for developers to make their ideas come to life. Our announcements this week aim to give developers all the tools they need to build their next application on the edge. These include things like static site hosting, certificate management, and image services, just to name a few.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re exploring a new type of service at the edge: containers.

This announcement will be exciting to some and surprising to many. On this very blog, we’ve talked about why we believe isolates — rather than containers on the edge — will be the future model for applications on the web.

Containers at the edge: it’s not what you think, or maybe it is

Isolates are best for Distributed Systems

Let us be clear: isolates are the best way to do edge compute, period. The Workers platform is designed to allow developers to treat our global network as one big computer. This has been a long-held dream of generations of engineers, inspiring slogans like "The Network is the Computer" — a trademark which, incidentally, we now own. Isolates and Durable Objects are finally making that vision possible.

In short, isolates excel at distributed systems. They are perfect for Continue reading

TCP/IP stack vulnerabilities threaten IoT devices

A set of vulnerabilities in TCP/IP stacks used by FreeBSD and three popular real-time operating systems designed for the IoT was revealed this week by security vendor Forescout and JSOF Research. The nine vulnerabilities could potentially affect 100 million devices in the wild.Nucleus NET, IPNet and NetX are the other operating systems affected by the vulnerabilities, which a joint report issued by Forescout and JSOF dubbed Name:Wreck.In a report on the vulnerabilities, Forescout writes that TCP/IP stacks are particularly vulnerable for several reasons, including widespread use, the fact that many such stacks were created a long time ago, and the fact that they make an attractive attack surface, thanks to unauthenticated functionality and protocols that cross network perimeters.To read this article in full, please click here

TCP/IP stack vulnerabilities threaten IoT devices

A set of vulnerabilities in TCP/IP stacks used by FreeBSD and three popular real-time operating systems designed for the IoT was revealed this week by security vendor Forescout and JSOF Research. The nine vulnerabilities could potentially affect 100 million devices in the wild.Nucleus NET, IPNet and NetX are the other operating systems affected by the vulnerabilities, which a joint report issued by Forescout and JSOF dubbed Name:Wreck.In a report on the vulnerabilities, Forescout writes that TCP/IP stacks are particularly vulnerable for several reasons, including widespread use, the fact that many such stacks were created a long time ago, and the fact that they make an attractive attack surface, thanks to unauthenticated functionality and protocols that cross network perimeters.To read this article in full, please click here

Heavy Networking 573: Using Application Dictionaries For Better Security Policy Management

Today's Heavy Networking thinks hard about how to manage security policy in modern IT infrastructure. We get into sources of truth, application modeling and application dictionaries, approval workflows, and more--all in the context of automation. Our guests are Ken Celenza and Brett Lykins from Network To Code.

The post Heavy Networking 573: Using Application Dictionaries For Better Security Policy Management appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Round-up of Nvidia GTC data-center news

With a few dozen press releases and blog posts combined, no one can say that Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is a low-key affair. Like last year’s show it is virtual, so many of the announcements are coming from CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s kitchen.Here is a rundown of the most pertinent announcements data-center folks will care about.Two Ampere 100 offshoots Nvidia's flagship GPU is the Ampere A100, introduced last year. It is a powerful chip ideal for supercomputing, high-performance computing (HPC), and massive artificial intelligence (AI) projects, but it’s also overkill for some use cases and some wallets.So at GTC the company introduced two smaller scale little brothers for its flagship A100, the A30 for mainstream AI and analytics servers, and the A10 for mixed compute and graphics workloads. Both are downsized from the bigger, more powerful, and more energy-consuming A100.To read this article in full, please click here

Real Life Ensues

Hey everyone! You probably noticed that I didn’t post a blog last week. Which means for the first time in over ten years I didn’t post one. The streak is done. Why? Well, real life decided to take over for a bit. I was up to my eyeballs in helping put on our BSA council Wood Badge course. I had a great time and completely lost track of time while I was there. And that means I didn’t get a chance to post something. Which is a perfect excuse to discuss why I set goals the way that I do.

Consistency Is Key

I write a lot. Between my blog here and the writing I do for Gestalt IT I do at least 2-3 posts a week. That’s on top of any briefing notes I type out or tweets I send when I have the energy to try and be funny. For someone that felt they weren’t a prolific writer in the past I can honestly say I spend a lot of time writing out things now. Which means that I have to try and keep a consistent schedule of doing things or else I will get swamped by some other Continue reading

Announcing Cloudflare’s Database Partners

Announcing Cloudflare’s Database Partners
Announcing Cloudflare’s Database Partners

Cloudflare Workers is the easiest way for developers to deploy their application’s code with performance, scale and security baked in. No configuration necessary. Worker code scales to serve billions of requests close to your users across Cloudflare’s 200+ data centers.

But that’s not the only interesting problem we need to solve. Every application has two parts: code and state.

State isn’t always the easiest to work in a massive distributed system. When an application runs in 200+ data centers simultaneously, there’s an inherent tradeoff between distributing the data for better performance, availability, scale, and guaranteeing that all data centers see the same data at a given point in time.

Our goal is to make state at the edge seamless. We started that journey with Workers KV, which provides low-latency access to globally distributed data. We’re since added Durable Objects, with strong consistency and the ability to design coordination patterns on top of Workers. We’re continuing to invest in and build out these products.

However, some use cases aren’t easily implemented with Workers KV or Durable Objects. Think querying complex datasets, or communicating with an existing system-of-record. Even if we built this functionality ourselves, there will always be customers who want Continue reading