Stop reacting to breaches and start preventing them with User Risk Scoring
Most security teams spend their days playing a high-stakes game of Whac-A-Mole. A user’s credentials get phished, or they accidentally download a malicious file, and suddenly you’re in incident response mode.
We built our SASE platform, Cloudflare One, to stop that cycle. By placing Access and Gateway in front of your applications and Internet traffic, we gave you the tools to decide who gets in and where they can go.
Today, we’re making those decisions smarter. You can now incorporate User Risk Scores directly into your zero trust network access (ZTNA) policies. Instead of just checking "Who is this user?" and "Is their device healthy?", you can now ask, "How has this user been behaving lately?" and adjust their access in real time.
For years, traditional corporate access was binary. You either had the right login and the right certificate, or you didn’t. But identity is fluid. A legitimate user can become a risk if their account is compromised or if they start exhibiting "insider threat" behaviors — like impossible travel, multiple failed login attempts, or triggering data loss prevention rules by moving sensitive data.
Cloudflare One now Continue reading
Moving from license plates to badges: the Gateway Authorization Proxy
We often talk about the "ideal" state, one where every device has a managed client like the Cloudflare One Client installed, providing deep visibility and seamless protection. However, reality often gets in the way.
Sometimes you are dealing with a company acquisition, managing virtual desktops, or working in a highly regulated environment where you simply cannot install software on an endpoint. You still need to protect that traffic, even when you don’t fully manage the device.
Closing this gap requires moving the identity challenge from the device to the network itself. By combining the browser’s native proxy capabilities with our global network, we can verify users and enforce granular policies on any device that can reach the Internet. We’ve built the Gateway Authorization Proxy and Proxy Auto-Configuration (PAC) File Hosting to automate this authentication and simplify how unmanaged devices connect to Cloudflare.
Back in 2022, we released proxy endpoints that allowed you to route traffic through Cloudflare to apply filtering rules. It solved the immediate need for access, but it had a significant "identity crisis."
Because that system relied on static IP addresses to identify users, it was a bit like a Continue reading
Defeating the deepfake: stopping laptop farms and insider threats
Trust is the most expensive vulnerability in modern security architecture. In recent years, the security industry has pivoted toward a zero trust model for networks — assuming breach and verifying every request. Yet when it comes to the people behind those requests, we often default back to implicit trust. We trust that the person on the Zoom call is who they say they are. We trust that the documents uploaded to an HR portal are genuine.
That trust is now being weaponized at an unprecedented scale.
In our 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report, we highlight a rapidly accelerating threat vector: the rise of "remote IT worker" fraud. Often linked to nation-states, including North Korea, these are not just individual bad actors. They are organized operations running laptop farms: warehouses of devices remotely accessed by workers using stolen identities to infiltrate companies, steal intellectual property (IP), and funnel revenue illicitly.
These attackers have evolved and continue to do so with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). They use generative AI to pass interviews and deepfake tools to fabricate flawless government IDs. Traditional background checks and standard identity providers (IdPs) are no longer enough. Bad actors are exploiting an identity assurance gap, Continue reading
Containerlab Network Emulator v0.73 Review
I first reviewed Containerlab in 2021 when it was a promising but relatively new container-based network emulator. Five years later, Containerlab has matured into a polished, developer-friendly platform with a rich ecosystem of tools around it. In this post, I will revisit Containerlab and cover what has changed since my original review.
What is Containerlab?
Containerlab is an open-source, container-based network emulation platform that lets you build, run, and tear down realistic network topologies using simple, declarative YAML files. It uses lightweight containers and Linux networking to interconnect routers, switches, hosts, and tools into reproducible labs that behave like real networks. It also supports virtual machines, so it can run many commercial router images.
Containerlab integrates cleanly with automation tools such as Ansible, Nornir, and CI/CD pipelines, and emphasizes “lab-as-code” workflows. It is well suited for network automation development, validating designs and configuration changes, and learning about complex scenarios like BGP, EVPN, or data-center fabrics on a single workstation or server.
The project was originally developed by Nokia engineers and is hosted on GitHub. It has grown into one of the most widely-used open-source network lab platforms, with an active community on Discord and a dedicated documentation site.
What’s Changed Continue reading
HW072: Wireless-Adjacent Products from Digi International
Digi International has a whole lot of things that aren’t exactly in the Wi-Fi space, but are close enough to be of interest to WLAN engineers. Joining us today to talk about Digi International’s wireless tech, and what it means for wireless LAN pros, is Bob Blumenscheid. Bob discusses Digi’s offerings, including their XBee modules,... Read more »PP099: The Care and Feeding of Kerberos for Windows Environments
Today we’re going to learn about the care and feeding of a three-headed dog named Kerberos. Developed at MIT and released in 1989, Kerberos is a free, open source authentication protocol that uses cryptographic keys to protect identity data as it crosses a network. Today, Kerberos is the backbone of Windows authentication. We’ll dive into... Read more »Introducing the 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report
Today’s threat landscape is more varied and chilling than ever: Sophisticated nation-state actors. Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. Deepfakes and fraudsters interviewing at your company. Even stealth attacks via trusted internal tools like Google Calendar, Dropbox, and GitHub.
After spending the last year translating trillions of network signals into actionable intelligence, Cloudforce One has identified a fundamental evolution in the threat landscape: the era of brute force entry is fading. In its place is a model of high-trust exploitation that prioritizes results at all costs. In order to equip defenders with a strategic roadmap for this new era, today we are releasing the inaugural 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report. This report provides the intelligence organizations need to navigate the rise of industrialized cyber threats.
Cloudforce One has observed a broader shift in attacker psychology. To understand how these methods win, we have to look at the why behind them: the Measure of Effectiveness, or MOE.
In 2026, the modern adversary is trading the pursuit of "sophistication" (complex, expensive, one-off hacks) in favor of throughput. MOE is the metric attackers use to decide what to exploit next. It is a cold calculation of the Continue reading
Evolving Cloudflare’s Threat Intelligence Platform: actionable, scalable, and ETL-less
For years, the cybersecurity industry has suffered from a "data gravity" problem. Security teams are buried under billions of rows of telemetry, yet they remain starved for actionable insights.
A Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) is a centralized security system that collects, aggregates, and organizes data about known and emerging cyber threats. It serves as the vital connective tissue between raw telemetry and active defense.
The underlying architecture of Cloudflare’s Threat Intelligence Platform sets it apart from other solutions. We have evolved our Threat Intelligence Platform to eliminate the need for complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines by using a sharded, SQLite-backed architecture. By running GraphQL directly on the edge, security teams can now visualize and automate threat response in real time. Instead of one massive database, we distribute Threat Events across thousands of logical shards — meaning sub-second query latency, even when aggregating millions of events across global datasets.
By unifying our global telemetry with the manual investigations performed by our analysts, our intelligence platform creates a single source of truth that allows security teams to move from observing a threat to preemptively blocking it across the Cloudflare network. We believe your intelligence platform shouldn't just tell you that Continue reading
Worth Reading: Faster than Dijkstra?
Bruce Davie published a nice article explaining why it makes little sense to use an algorithm that’s supposedly faster than Dijkstra’s in link-state routing protocols.
Other interesting data points from the article (and linked presentations):
- People are running (a few) thousands of routers in a single area
- Running Dijkstra’s algorithm on an emulated network with 2000 nodes took 100 msec… in 2003 (page 18 of this NANOG presentation).
It turns out (as I expected) that all the noise about the need for new routing protocols we were experiencing a few years ago was either due to bad implementations or coming from nerds looking for new toys to play with.
See risk, fix risk: introducing Remediation in Cloudflare CASB
Starting today, Cloudflare CASB customers can do more than see risky file-sharing across their SaaS apps: they can fix it, directly from the Cloudflare One dashboard.
This launch marks a huge advancement for Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). Since its release, Cloudflare’s API-based CASB has focused on providing robust, comprehensive visibility and detection. It also connects to the SaaS tools your business runs on, surfacing misconfigurations, and flagging overshared data before it becomes tomorrow’s incident.
With today’s release of Remediation – a new way to fix problems with just a click, right from the CASB Findings page – CASB begins its next chapter, and moves from telling you what’s wrong to helping you make it right.
An example of a Remediation Action (Remove Public File Sharing) in a CASB Finding.
Inside Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, CASB connects to the SaaS and cloud tools your teams already use. By talking to providers over API, CASB gives security and IT teams:
A consolidated view of misconfigurations, overshared files, and risky access patterns across apps like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Box, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence (CASB Integrations).
From reactive to proactive: closing the phishing gap with LLMs
Email security has always been defined by impermanence. It is a perpetual call-and-response arms race, where defenses are only as strong as the last bypass discovered and attackers iterate relentlessly for even marginal gains. Every control we deploy eventually becomes yesterday’s solution.
What makes this challenge especially difficult is that our biggest weaknesses are, by definition, invisible.
This problem is best illustrated by a classic example from World War II. Mathematician Abraham Wald was tasked with helping Allied engineers decide where to reinforce bomber aircraft. Engineers initially focused on the bullet holes visible on planes returning from missions. Wald pointed out the flaw: they were reinforcing the areas where planes could already take damage and survive. The true vulnerabilities were on the planes that never came back.
Email security faces an identical hurdle: our detection gaps are unseen. By integrating LLMs, we advance email phishing protection and move from reactive to proactive detection improvement.
The limits of reactive defense
Traditional email security systems improve primarily through user-reported misses. For example, if we marked a spam message as clean, customers can send us the original EML to our pipelines for our analysts to analyze and update our models. This feedback loop Continue reading
How Cloudy translates complex security into human action
Today’s security ecosystem generates a staggering amount of complex telemetry. For instance, processing a single email requires analyzing sender reputation, authentication results, link behavior, infrastructure metadata, and countless other attributes. Simultaneously, Cloud access security broker (CASB) engines continuously scan SaaS environments for signals that detect misconfigurations, risky access, and exposed data.
But while detections have become more sophisticated, explanations have not always kept pace.
Security and IT teams are often aware when something is flagged, but they do not always know, at a glance, why. End users are asked to make real-time decisions about emails that may impact the entire organization, yet they are rarely given clear, contextual guidance in the moment that matters.
Cloudy changes that.
Cloudy is our LLM-powered explanation layer, built directly into Cloudflare One. It translates complex machine learning outputs into precise, human-readable guidance for security teams and end users alike. Instead of exposing raw technical signals, Cloudy surfaces the reasoning behind a detection in a way that drives informed action.
For Cloudflare Email Security, this means helping users understand why a message was flagged before they escalate it to the security operations center, or SOC. For Cloudflare CASB, it means helping administrators quickly understand Continue reading
Initial Setup of MikroTik hAP ax³ Router
The MikroTik hAP ax³ is the latest addition to MikroTik's family of dual-band wireless routers. […]
The post Initial Setup of MikroTik hAP ax³ Router first appeared on Brezular's Blog.
NB564: New Juniper Routers Pump Up AI and Cloud-Scale Traffic; Anthropic Vs. DoD
Take a Network Break! We start with follow-up on the proper pronunciation of the US state of Nevada, and then sound the alarm about new research that gets around WiFi client isolation and could enable man-in-the-middle attacks. On the news front, AMD and Meta strike a massive deal in which AMD will sell its stock... Read more »Tech Bytes: Protecting OT Networks When the Perimeter Vanishes (Sponsored)
OT networks used to be air-gapped. These days, more and more OT networks are being bridged by IT networks, which exposes critical industrial controls and other systems to serious risk. On today’s Tech Bytes, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we dig into how organizations can detect “precursor signals” that may indicate a broader attack chain,... Read more »netlab: Using L3VPN (MPLS/VPN) with SR-MPLS Core
Someone recently asked me whether it’s possible to use netlab to build an MPLS/VPN (technically, BGP/MPLS IP VPN) lab with SR-MPLS core. Of course, let’s build a simple lab using Arista EOS and Linux containers to implement this topology:
Lab topology
Here’s the lab topology we’ll use (also available on GitHub):
Packet trimming Deep Dive – Part IV
Receive Network Processing Unit (Rx NPU)
Figure 9-4 illustrates a simplified receive-side processing pipeline, starting from the moment a Packet Header Vector (PHV), constructed by the Rx IFG, is delivered to the Receive Network Processing Unit (Rx NPU).
When the PHV arrives at the Rx NPU, it is dispatched to one of the Run-to-Completion (RTC) cores in the Packet Processing Array (PPA). Each RTC core processes the packet within a single execution context, allowing parsing, classification, lookup, and queuing decisions to be resolved without intermediate handoffs between processing stages.
The first task of the RTC parser is to perform deep inspection of the packet headers. While the Rx IFG has already extracted basic Layer-2 and Layer-3 information, the RTC parser determines whether the packet is tunneled and whether the switch itself is the tunnel termination point. To demonstrate this behavior, consider a VXLAN-encapsulated packet. The outer Ethernet and IP headers are used to forward the packet through the underlay network. If the outer destination IP address matches one of the local switch IP addresses, the device identifies itself as the tunnel endpoint. The tunneling protocol is recognized by examining the UDP header, where destination port 4789 indicates VXLAN. After the Continue reading
The truly programmable SASE platform
Every organization approaches security through a unique lens, shaped by their tooling, requirements, and history. No two environments look the same, and none stay static for long. We believe the platforms that protect them shouldn't be static either.
Cloudflare built our global network to be programmable by design, so we can help organizations unlock this flexibility and freedom. In this post, we’ll go deeper into what programmability means, and how Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, helps customers architect their security and networking with our building blocks to meet their unique and custom needs.
The term programmability has become diluted by the industry. Most security vendors claim programmability because they have public APIs, documented Terraform providers, webhooks, and alerting. That’s great, and Cloudflare offers all of those things too.
These foundational capabilities provide customization, infrastructure-as-code, and security operations automation, but they're table stakes. With traditional programmability, you can configure a webhook to send an alert to Slack when a policy triggers.
But the true value of programmability is something different. It is the ability to intercept a security event, enrich it with external context, and act on it in real time. Say a user attempts to Continue reading
Beyond the blank slate: how Cloudflare accelerates your Zero Trust journey
In the world of cybersecurity, "starting from scratch" is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a clean slate; on the other, you face a mountain of configurations, best practices, and potential "gotchas."
While Cloudflare One has been often cited as one of the easiest-to-use SASE platforms, there is no magic without proper configuration. And while Cloudflare has been striving to simplify complex networking concepts by creating products such as Cloudflare WAN, Magic Transit, and Cloudflare Network Firewall, which simplify and reduce the typical complexity associated with deploying comparable functions from other vendors, the breadth of capabilities provided by Cloudflare One require creation of best-practice policies and templates to achieve the most optimal outcomes.
To make it easy to start taking advantage of Cloudflare’s powerful SASE platform, we have developed a method that ensures customers get the right configuration quickly and easily. We call it Project Helix.
In this post, we’ll dig into the problem of getting the correct customization, and how we built Project Helix to make it simple. That means our customers have access to the most powerful SASE platform out there — and the easiest to onboard.
The complexity barrier: Why Continue reading
Modernizing with agile SASE: a Cloudflare One blog takeover
Return to office has stalled for many, and the “new normal” for what the corporate network means is constantly changing. In 2026, your office may be a coffee shop, your workforce includes autonomous AI agents, and your perimeter is wherever the Internet reaches. This shift has forced a fundamental change in how we think about security, moving us toward a critical new architecture: agile SASE.
For too long, organizations have struggled under a 'fragmentation penalty,' juggling a patchwork of legacy hardware and Virtual Private Network (VPN) concentrators. These tools don't just require massive upfront investment; they create a mountain of technical debt — the cumulative cost of maintaining thousands of conflicting firewall rules, manual patches, and aging hardware that can’t support AI-scale traffic.
First-generation SASE providers promised a cure, but often just moved the mess to the cloud. By treating every data center as an isolated island, they’ve replaced hardware silos with operational silos. The result isn't a lack of visibility, but a lack of actionability: plenty of data, but no single way to enforce a consistent policy across a borderless enterprise.
Our customers have told us they need an agile and composable platform. This week, we are announcing Continue reading