Video: Internet Routing Security (DEEP 2023)
My Internet Routing Security talk from last year’s DEEP conference (a shorter version of the Internet Routing Security webinar) is now available on YouTube.
Hope you’ll find it useful ;)
Cloudflare 2024 Year in Review
The 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is our fifth annual review of Internet trends and patterns observed throughout the year at both a global and country/region level across a variety of metrics. In this year’s review, we have added several new traffic, adoption, connectivity, and email security metrics, as well as the ability to do year-over-year and geographic comparisons for selected metrics.
Below, we present a summary of key findings, and then explore them in more detail in subsequent sections.
Global Internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024. 🔗
Google maintained its position as the most popular Internet service overall. OpenAI remained at the top of the Generative AI category. Binance remained at the top of the Cryptocurrency category. WhatsApp remained the top Messaging platform, and Facebook remained the top Social Media site. 🔗
Global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, in line with last year’s growth rate. After initiating service in Malawi in July 2023, Starlink traffic from that country grew 38x in 2024. As Starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. 🔗
Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, was responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Continue reading
What’s new in Cloudflare: Account Owned Tokens and Zaraz Automated Actions
In October 2024, we started publishing roundup blog posts to share the latest features and updates from our teams. Today, we are announcing general availability for Account Owned Tokens, which allow organizations to improve access control for their Cloudflare services. Additionally, we are launching Zaraz Automated Actions, which is a new feature designed to streamline event tracking and tool integration when setting up third-party tools. By automating common actions like pageviews, custom events, and e-commerce tracking, it removes the need for manual configurations.
Cloudflare is critical infrastructure for the Internet, and we understand that many of the organizations that build on Cloudflare rely on apps and integrations outside the platform to make their lives easier. In order to allow access to Cloudflare resources, these apps and integrations interact with Cloudflare via our API, enabled by access tokens and API keys. Today, the API Access Tokens and API keys on the Cloudflare platform are owned by individual users, which can lead to some difficulty representing services, and adds an additional dependency on managing users alongside token permissions.
First, a little explanation because the terms can Continue reading
The Future Of Security: Harnessing AI And Storage For Smarter Protection
COMMISSIONED: As the world becomes more data-driven, the landscape of safety and security is evolving in remarkable ways. …
The Future Of Security: Harnessing AI And Storage For Smarter Protection was written by Martin Courtney at The Next Platform.
Cloudflare acquires Kivera to add simple, preventive cloud security to Cloudflare One
We’re excited to announce that Kivera, a cloud security, data protection, and compliance company, has joined Cloudflare. This acquisition extends our SASE portfolio to incorporate inline cloud app controls, empowering Cloudflare One customers with preventative security controls for all their cloud services.
In today’s digital landscape, cloud services and SaaS (software as a service) apps have become indispensable for the daily operation of organizations. At the same time, the amount of data flowing between organizations and their cloud providers has ballooned, increasing the chances of data leakage, compliance issues, and worse, opportunities for attackers. Additionally, many companies — especially at enterprise scale — are working directly with multiple cloud providers for flexibility based on the strengths, resiliency against outages or errors, and cost efficiencies of different clouds.
Security teams that rely on Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) or similar tools for monitoring cloud configurations and permissions and Infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning are falling short due to detecting issues only after misconfigurations occur with an overwhelming volume of alerts. The combination of Kivera and Cloudflare One puts preventive controls directly into the deployment process, or ‘inline’, blocking errors before they happen. This offers a proactive approach essential to Continue reading
Enhance your website’s security with Cloudflare’s free security.txt generator
Meet Georgia, a diligent website administrator at a growing e-commerce company. Every day, Georgia juggles multiple tasks, from managing server uptime to ensuring customer data security. One morning, Georgia receives an email from a security researcher who discovered a potential vulnerability on the website. The researcher struggled to find the right contact information, leading to delays in reporting the issue. Georgia realizes the need for a standardized way to communicate with security researchers, ensuring that vulnerabilities are reported swiftly and efficiently. This is where security.txt comes in.
Security.txt is becoming a widely adopted standard among security-conscious organizations. By providing a common location and format for vulnerability disclosure information, it helps bridge the gap between security researchers and organizations. This initiative is supported by major companies and aligns with global security best practices. By offering an automated security.txt generator for free, we aim to empower all of our users to enhance their security measures without additional costs.
In 2020, Cloudflare published the Cloudflare Worker for the security.txt generator as an open-source project on GitHub, demonstrating our commitment to enhancing web security. This tool is actively used Continue reading
How Cloudflare auto-mitigated world record 3.8 Tbps DDoS attack
Since early September, Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems have been combating a month-long campaign of hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks. Cloudflare’s defenses mitigated over one hundred hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks throughout the month, with many exceeding 2 billion packets per second (Bpps) and 3 terabits per second (Tbps). The largest attack peaked 3.8 Tbps — the largest ever disclosed publicly by any organization. Detection and mitigation was fully autonomous. The graphs below represent two separate attack events that targeted the same Cloudflare customer and were mitigated autonomously.
A mitigated 3.8 Terabits per second DDoS attack that lasted 65 seconds
A mitigated 2.14 billion packet per second DDoS attack that lasted 60 seconds
Cloudflare customers are protected
Cloudflare customers using Cloudflare’s HTTP reverse proxy services (e.g. Cloudflare WAF and Cloudflare CDN) are automatically protected.
Cloudflare customers using Spectrum and Magic Transit are also automatically protected. Magic Transit customers can further optimize their protection by deploying Magic Firewall rules to enforce a strict positive and negative security model at the packet layer.
Other Internet properties may not be safe
The scale and frequency of these attacks are unprecedented. Due to their sheer size and bits/packets per second rates, these Continue reading
Wrapping up another Birthday Week celebration
2024 marks Cloudflare’s 14th birthday. Birthday Week each year is packed with major announcements and the release of innovative new offerings, all focused on giving back to our customers and the broader Internet community. Birthday Week has become a proud tradition at Cloudflare and our culture, to not just stay true to our mission, but to always stay close to our customers. We begin planning for this week of celebration earlier in the year and invite everyone at Cloudflare to participate.
Months before Birthday Week, we invited teams to submit ideas for what to announce. We were flooded with submissions, from proposals for implementing new standards to creating new products for developers. Our biggest challenge is finding space for it all in just one week — there is still so much to build. Good thing we have a birthday to celebrate each year, but we might need an extra day in Birthday Week next year!
In case you missed it, here’s everything we announced during 2024’s Birthday Week:
Monday
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content |
Understand which AI-related bots and crawlers can access your website, and which content you choose to allow Continue reading |
AI Everywhere with the WAF Rule Builder Assistant, Cloudflare Radar AI Insights, and updated AI bot protection
The continued growth of AI has fundamentally changed the Internet over the past 24 months. AI is increasingly ubiquitous, and Cloudflare is leaning into the new opportunities and challenges it presents in a big way. This year for Cloudflare’s birthday, we’ve extended our AI Assistant capabilities to help you build new WAF rules, added AI bot traffic insights on Cloudflare Radar, and given customers new AI bot blocking capabilities.
AI Assistant for WAF Rule Builder
At Cloudflare, we’re always listening to your feedback and striving to make our products as user-friendly and powerful as possible. One area where we've heard your feedback loud and clear is in the complexity of creating custom and rate-limiting rules for our Web Application Firewall (WAF). With this in mind, we’re excited to introduce a new feature that will make rule creation easier and more intuitive: the AI Assistant for WAF Rule Builder.
By simply entering a natural language prompt, you can generate a custom or rate-limiting rule tailored to your needs. For example, instead of manually configuring a complex rule matching criteria, you can now type something like, "Match requests with low bot score," and the assistant will generate the rule for Continue reading
Advancing cybersecurity: Cloudflare implements a new bug bounty VIP program as part of CISA Pledge commitment
As our digital world becomes increasingly more complex, the importance of cybersecurity grows ever more critical. As a result, Cloudflare is proud to promote our commitment to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ‘Secure by Design’ pledge. The commitment is built around seven security goals, aimed at enhancing the safety of our products and delivering the most secure solutions to our customers.
Cloudflare’s commitment to the CISA pledge reflects our dedication to transparency and accountability to our customers, and to cybersecurity best practices. Furthermore, Cloudflare is committed to being a trusted partner by sharing our strategies to ensure the highest priority is placed on safeguarding our customers’ security.
Bug bounty VIP program
Cloudflare has successfully managed a public Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP) for years; our belief is that collaboration is the cornerstone of effective cybersecurity. We are excited to announce a major milestone in our journey to meet Goal #5 of the pledge: our program will now include a bug bounty VIP program in conjunction with our bug bounty public program.
Continuous investment in maturing our bug bounty program is a vital tool for the success of any security organization. By encouraging broader participation in vulnerability testing, Continue reading
Cloudflare helps verify the security of end-to-end encrypted messages by auditing key transparency for WhatsApp
Chances are good that today you’ve sent a message through an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app such as WhatsApp, Signal, or iMessage. While we often take the privacy of these conversations for granted, they in fact rely on decades of research, testing, and standardization efforts, the foundation of which is a public-private key exchange. There is, however, an oft-overlooked implicit trust inherent in this model: that the messaging app infrastructure is distributing the public keys of all of its users correctly.
Here’s an example: if Joe and Alice are messaging each other on WhatsApp, Joe uses Alice’s phone number to retrieve Alice’s public key from the WhatsApp database, and Alice receives Joe’s public key. Their messages are then encrypted using this key exchange, so that no one — even WhatsApp — can see the contents of their messages besides Alice and Joe themselves. However, in the unlikely situation where an attacker, Bob, manages to register a different public key in WhatsApp’s database, Joe would try to message Alice but unknowingly be messaging Bob instead. And while this threat is most salient for journalists, activists, and those most vulnerable to cyber attacks, we believe that protecting the privacy and integrity of Continue reading
Cloudflare partners with Internet Service Providers and network equipment providers to deliver a safer browsing experience to millions of homes
A committed journey of privacy and security
In 2018, Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1, one of the fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS services. 1.1.1.1 was the first consumer product Cloudflare ever launched, focused on reaching a wider audience. This service was designed to be fast and private, and does not retain information that would identify who is making a request.
In 2020, Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1 for Families, designed to add a layer of protection to our existing 1.1.1.1 public resolver. The intent behind this product was to provide consumers, namely families, the ability to add a security and adult content filter to block unsuspecting users from accessing specific sites when browsing the Internet.
Today, we are officially announcing that any ISP and equipment manufacturer can use our DNS resolvers for free. Internet service, network, and hardware equipment providers can sign up and join this program to partner with Cloudflare to deliver a safer browsing experience that is easy to use, industry leading, and at no cost to anyone.
Leading companies have already partnered with Cloudflare to deliver superior and customized offerings to protect their customers. By delivering this service Continue reading
A safer Internet with Cloudflare: free threat intelligence, analytics, and new threat detections
Anyone using the Internet likely touches Cloudflare’s network on a daily basis, either by accessing a site protected by Cloudflare, using our 1.1.1.1 resolver, or connecting via a network using our Cloudflare One products.
This puts Cloudflare in a position of great responsibility to make the Internet safer for billions of users worldwide. Today we are providing threat intelligence and more than 10 new security features for free to all of our customers. Whether you are using Cloudflare to protect your website, your home network, or your office, you will find something useful that you can start using with just a few clicks.
These features are focused around some of the largest growing concerns in cybersecurity, including account takeover attacks, supply chain attacks, attacks against API endpoints, network visibility, and data leaks from your network.
More security for everyone
You can read more about each one of these features in the sections below, but we wanted to provide a short summary upfront.
If you are a cyber security enthusiast: you can head over to our new Cloudforce One threat intelligence website to find out about threat actors, attack campaigns, and other Internet-wide Continue reading
Introducing Ephemeral IDs: a new tool for fraud detection
In the early days of the Internet, a single IP address was a reliable indicator of a single user. However, today’s Internet is more complex. Shared IP addresses are now common, with users connecting via mobile IP address pools, VPNs, or behind CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation). This makes relying on IP addresses alone a weak method to combat modern threats like automated attacks and fraudulent activity. Additionally, many Internet users have no option but to use an IP address which they don’t have sole control over, and as such, should not be penalized for that.
At Cloudflare, we are solving this complexity with Turnstile, our CAPTCHA alternative. And now, we’re taking the next step in advancing security with Ephemeral IDs, a new feature that generates a unique short-lived ID, without relying on any network-level information.
When a website visitor interacts with Turnstile, we now calculate an Ephemeral ID that can link behavior to a specific client instead of an IP address. This means that even when attackers rotate through large pools of IP addresses, we can still identify and block malicious actions. For example, in attacks like credential stuffing or account signups, where fraudsters attempt to disguise Continue reading
Oracle Puts AI, Automation Between Its Cloud And the Bad Guys
Despite a slow start several years ago, Oracle has refashioned itself into a cloud builder, rapidly expanding its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to make it among the top second-tier providers, although still well behind the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. …
Oracle Puts AI, Automation Between Its Cloud And the Bad Guys was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Advancing Threat Intelligence: JA4 fingerprints and inter-request signals
For many years, Cloudflare has used advanced fingerprinting techniques to help block online threats, in products like our DDoS engine, our WAF, and Bot Management. For the purposes of Bot Management, fingerprinting characteristic elements of client software help us quickly identify what kind of software is making an HTTP request. It’s an efficient and accurate way to differentiate a browser from a Python script, while preserving user privacy. These fingerprints are used on their own for simple rules, and they underpin complex machine learning models as well.
Making sure our fingerprints keep pace with the pace of change on the Internet is a constant and critical task. Bots will always adapt to try and look more browser-like. Less frequently, browsers will introduce major changes to their behavior and affect the entire Internet landscape. Last year, Google did exactly that, making older TLS fingerprints almost useless for identifying the latest version of Chrome.
Cloudflare network fingerprinting techniques
These methods are instrumental in accurately scoring and classifying bots, enhancing security measures, and enriching data analytics capabilities. Below are some examples of the fingerprinting techniques we have implemented over the years:
HTTP Signature: The HTTP Signature technique involves analyzing HTTP Continue reading
Avoiding downtime: modern alternatives to outdated certificate pinning practices
In today’s world, technology is quickly evolving and some practices that were once considered the gold standard are quickly becoming outdated. At Cloudflare, we stay close to industry changes to ensure that we can provide the best solutions to our customers. One practice that we’re continuing to see in use that no longer serves its original purpose is certificate pinning. In this post, we’ll dive into certificate pinning, the consequences of using it in today’s Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) world, and alternatives to pinning that offer the same level of security without the management overhead.
PKI exists to help issue and manage TLS certificates, which are vital to keeping the Internet secure – they ensure that users access the correct applications or servers and that data between two parties stays encrypted. The mis-issuance of a certificate can pose great risk. For example, if a malicious party is able to issue a TLS certificate for your bank’s website, then they can potentially impersonate your bank and intercept that traffic to get access to your bank account. To prevent a mis-issued certificate from intercepting traffic, the server can give a certificate to the client and say “only trust connections if Continue reading