How we simplified NCMEC reporting with Cloudflare Workflows
Cloudflare plays a significant role in supporting the Internet’s infrastructure. As a reverse proxy by approximately 20% of all websites, we sit directly in the request path between users and the origin, helping to improve performance, security, and reliability at scale. Beyond that, our global network powers services like delivery, Workers, and R2 — making Cloudflare not just a passive intermediary, but an active platform for delivering and hosting content across the Internet.
Since Cloudflare’s launch in 2010, we have collaborated with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and are committed to doing what we can to support identification and removal of CSAM content.
Members of the public, customers, and trusted organizations can submit reports of abuse observed on Cloudflare’s network. A minority of these reports relate to CSAM, which are triaged with the highest priority by Cloudflare’s Trust & Safety team. We will also forward details of the report, along with relevant files (where applicable) and supplemental information to NCMEC.
The process to generate and submit reports to NCMEC involves multiple steps, dependencies, and error handling, which quickly became complex under Continue reading
Cloudflare’s commitment to CISA Secure-By-Design pledge: delivering new kernels, faster
As cyber threats continue to exploit systemic vulnerabilities in widely used technologies, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) produced best practices for the technology industry with their Secure-by-Design pledge. Cloudflare proudly signed this pledge on May 8, 2024, reinforcing our commitment to creating resilient systems where security is not just a feature, but a foundational principle.
We’re excited to share and provide transparency into how our security patching process meets one of CISA’s goals in the pledge: Demonstrating actions taken to increase installation of security patches for our customers.
Managing and deploying Linux kernel updates is one of Cloudflare’s most challenging security processes. In 2024, over 1000 CVEs were logged against the Linux kernel and patched. To keep our systems secure, it is vital to perform critical patch deployment across systems while maintaining the user experience.
A common technical support phrase is “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?”. One may be surprised how often this tactic is used — it is also an essential part of how Cloudflare operates at scale when it comes to applying our most critical patches. Frequently restarting systems exercises the Continue reading
Worth Reading: Why Quantum Crypto is Bollocks
Today is a perfect day to point out the fantastic Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks presentation (HT: A blog post by George Michaelson)
It’s a must-read, even if you’re absolutely uninterested in the topic. Just replace “Quantum mumbo-jumbo” with AI or SDN ;) Have fun!
Cloudflare for AI: supporting AI adoption at scale with a security-first approach
AI is transforming businesses — from automated agents performing background workflows, to improved search, to easier access and summarization of knowledge.
While we are still early in what is likely going to be a substantial shift in how the world operates, two things are clear: the Internet, and how we interact with it, will change, and the boundaries of security and data privacy have never been more difficult to trace, making security an important topic in this shift.
At Cloudflare, we have a mission to help build a better Internet. And while we can only speculate on what AI will bring in the future, its success will rely on it being reliable and safe to use.
Today, we are introducing Cloudflare for AI: a suite of tools aimed at helping businesses, developers, and content creators adopt, deploy, and secure AI technologies at scale safely.
Cloudflare for AI is not just a grouping of tools and features, some of which are new, but also a commitment to focus our future development work with AI in mind.
Let’s jump in to see what Cloudflare for AI can deliver for developers, security teams, and content creators…
If you Continue reading
Take control of public AI application security with Cloudflare’s Firewall for AI
Imagine building an LLM-powered assistant trained on your developer documentation and some internal guides to quickly help customers, reduce support workload, and improve user experience. Sounds great, right? But what if sensitive data, such as employee details or internal discussions, is included in the data used to train the LLM? Attackers could manipulate the assistant into exposing sensitive data or exploit it for social engineering attacks, where they deceive individuals or systems into revealing confidential details, or use it for targeted phishing attacks. Suddenly, your helpful AI tool turns into a serious security liability.
Today, as part of Security Week 2025, we’re announcing the open beta of Firewall for AI, first introduced during Security Week 2024. After talking with customers interested in protecting their LLM apps, this first beta release is focused on discovery and PII detection, and more features will follow in the future.
If you are already using Cloudflare application security, your LLM-powered applications are automatically discovered and protected, with no complex setup, no maintenance, and no extra integration needed.
Firewall for AI is an inline security solution that protects user-facing LLM-powered applications from Continue reading
Improved Bot Management flexibility and visibility with new high-precision heuristics
Within the Cloudflare Application Security team, every machine learning model we use is underpinned by a rich set of static rules that serve as a ground truth and a baseline comparison for how our models are performing. These are called heuristics. Our Bot Management heuristics engine has served as an important part of eight global machine learning (ML) models, but we needed a more expressive engine to increase our accuracy. In this post, we’ll review how we solved this by moving our heuristics to the Cloudflare Ruleset Engine. Not only did this provide the platform we needed to write more nuanced rules, it made our platform simpler and safer, and provided Bot Management customers more flexibility and visibility into their bot traffic.
In Cloudflare’s bot detection, we build heuristics from attributes like software library fingerprints, HTTP request characteristics, and internal threat intelligence. Heuristics serve three separate purposes for bot detection:
Bot identification: If traffic matches a heuristic, we can identify the traffic as definitely automated traffic (with a bot score of 1) without the need of a machine learning model.
Train ML models: When traffic matches our heuristics, we create labelled datasets Continue reading
Unleashing improved context for threat actor activity with our Cloudforce One threat events platform
Today, one of the greatest challenges that cyber defenders face is analyzing detection hits from indicator feeds, which provide metadata about specific indicators of compromise (IOCs), like IP addresses, ASNs, domains, URLs, and hashes. While indicator feeds have proliferated across the threat intelligence industry, most feeds contain no contextual information about why an indicator was placed on the feed. Another limitation of most feeds today is that they focus solely on blockable indicators and cannot easily accommodate more complex cases, such as a threat actor exploiting a CVE or an insider threat. Instead, this sort of complex threat intelligence is left for long form reporting. However, long-form reporting comes with its own challenges, such as the time required for writing and editing, which can lead to significant delays in releasing timely threat intelligence.
To help address these challenges, we are excited to launch our threat events platform for Cloudforce One customers. Every day, Cloudflare blocks billions of cyber threats. This new platform contains contextual data about the threats we monitor and mitigate on the Cloudflare network and is designed to empower security practitioners and decision makers with actionable insights from a global perspective.
On average, we process 71 Continue reading
One platform to manage your company’s predictive security posture with Cloudflare
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, companies are managing an increasingly complex mix of environments — from SaaS applications and public cloud platforms to on-prem data centers and hybrid setups. This diverse infrastructure offers flexibility and scalability, but also opens up new attack surfaces.
To support both business continuity and security needs, “security must evolve from being reactive to predictive”. Maintaining a healthy security posture entails monitoring and strengthening your security defenses to identify risks, ensure compliance, and protect against evolving threats. With our newest capabilities, you can now use Cloudflare to achieve a healthy posture across your SaaS and web applications. This addresses any security team’s ultimate (daily) question: How well are our assets and documents protected?
A predictive security posture relies on the following key components:
Real-time discovery and inventory of all your assets and documents
Continuous asset-aware threat detection and risk assessment
Prioritised remediation suggestions to increase your protection
Today, we are sharing how we have built these key components across SaaS and web applications, and how you can use them to manage your business’s security posture.
Regardless of the applications you have connected to Cloudflare’s global network, Cloudflare actively scans Continue reading
Cloudflare enables native monitoring and forensics with Log Explorer and custom dashboards
In 2024, we announced Log Explorer, giving customers the ability to store and query their HTTP and security event logs natively within the Cloudflare network. Today, we are excited to announce that Log Explorer now supports logs from our Zero Trust product suite. In addition, customers can create custom dashboards to monitor suspicious or unusual activity.
Every day, Cloudflare detects and protects customers against billions of threats, including DDoS attacks, bots, web application exploits, and more. SOC analysts, who are charged with keeping their companies safe from the growing spectre of Internet threats, may want to investigate these threats to gain additional insights on attacker behavior and protect against future attacks. Log Explorer, by collecting logs from various Cloudflare products, provides a single starting point for investigations. As a result, analysts can avoid forwarding logs to other tools, maximizing productivity and minimizing costs. Further, analysts can monitor signals specific to their organizations using custom dashboards.
Log Explorer stores your Cloudflare logs for a 30-day retention period so that you can analyze them natively and in a single interface, within the Cloudflare Dashboard. Cloudflare log data is diverse, reflecting the breadth of capabilities Continue reading
Extending Cloudflare Radar’s security insights with new DDoS, leaked credentials, and bots datasets
Security and attacks continues to be a very active environment, and the visibility that Cloudflare Radar provides on this dynamic landscape has evolved and expanded over time. To that end, during 2023’s Security Week, we launched our URL Scanner, which enables users to safely scan any URL to determine if it is safe to view or interact with. During 2024’s Security Week, we launched an Email Security page, which provides a unique perspective on the threats posed by malicious emails, spam volume, the adoption of email authentication methods like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, and the use of IPv4/IPv6 and TLS by email servers. For Security Week 2025, we are adding several new DDoS-focused graphs, new insights into leaked credential trends, and a new Bots page to Cloudflare Radar. We are also taking this opportunity to refactor Radar’s Security & Attacks page, breaking it out into Application Layer and Network Layer sections.
Below, we review all of these changes and additions to Radar.
Since Cloudflare Radar launched in 2020, it has included both network layer (Layers 3 & 4) and application layer (Layer 7) attack traffic insights on a single Security & Attacks page. Over Continue reading
Enhanced security and simplified controls with automated botnet protection, cipher suite selection, and URL Scanner updates
At Cloudflare, we are constantly innovating and launching new features and capabilities across our product portfolio. Today, we're releasing a number of new features aimed at improving the security tools available to our customers.
Automated security level: Cloudflare’s Security Level setting has been improved and no longer requires manual configuration. By integrating botnet data along with other request rate signals, all customers are protected from confirmed known malicious botnet traffic without any action required.
Cipher suite selection: You now have greater control over encryption settings via the Cloudflare dashboard, including specific cipher suite selection based on our client or compliance requirements.
Improved URL scanner: New features include bulk scanning, similarity search, location picker and more.
These updates are designed to give you more power and flexibility when managing online security, from proactive threat detection to granular control over encryption settings.
Cloudflare’s Security Level feature was designed to protect customer websites from malicious activity.
Available to all Cloudflare customers, including the free tier, it has always had very simple logic: if a connecting client IP address has shown malicious behavior across our network, issue a managed challenge. The system tracks malicious behavior Continue reading
Chaos in Cloudflare’s Lisbon office: securing the Internet with wave motion
Over the years, Cloudflare has gained fame for many things, including our technical blog, but also as a tech company securing the Internet using lava lamps, a story that began as a research/science project almost 10 years ago. In March 2025, we added another layer to its legacy: a "wall of entropy" made of 50 wave machines in constant motion at our Lisbon office, the company's European HQ.
These wave machines are a new source of entropy, joining lava lamps in San Francisco, suspended rainbows in Austin, and double chaotic pendulums in London. The entropy they generate contributes to securing the Internet through LavaRand.
The new waves wall at Cloudflare’s Lisbon office sits beside the Radar Display of global Internet insights, with the 25th of April Bridge overlooking the Tagus River in the background.
It’s exciting to see waves in Portugal now playing a role in keeping the Internet secure, especially given Portugal’s deep maritime history.
The installation honors Portugal’s passion for the sea and exploration of the unknown, famously beginning over 600 years ago, in 1415, with pioneering vessels like caravels and naus/carracks, precursors to galleons and other ships. Portuguese sea exploration was driven by navigation schools Continue reading
Welcome to Security Week 2025
The layer of security around today’s Internet is essential to safeguarding everything. From the way we shop online, engage with our communities, access critical healthcare resources, sustain the worldwide digital economy, and beyond. Our dependence on the Internet has led to cyber attacks that are bigger and more widespread than ever, worsening the so-called defender’s dilemma: attackers only need to succeed once, while defenders must succeed every time.
In the past year alone, we discovered and mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded in the history of the Internet – three different times – underscoring the rapid and persistent efforts of threat actors. We helped safeguard the largest year of elections across the globe, with more than half the world’s population eligible to vote, all while witnessing geopolitical tensions and war reflected in the digital world.
2025 already promises to follow suit, with cyberattacks estimated to cost the global economy $10.5 trillion in 2025. As the rapid advancement of AI and emerging technologies increases, and as threat actors become more agile and creative, the security landscape continues to drastically evolve. Organizations now face a higher volume of attacks, and an influx of more complex threats that carry real-world consequences, Continue reading
Keep AI interactions secure and risk-free with Guardrails in AI Gateway
The transition of AI from experimental to production is not without its challenges. Developers face the challenge of balancing rapid innovation with the need to protect users and meet strict regulatory requirements. To address this, we are introducing Guardrails in AI Gateway, designed to help you deploy AI safely and confidently.
LLMs are inherently non-deterministic, meaning outputs can be unpredictable. Additionally, you have no control over your users, and they may ask for something wildly inappropriate or attempt to elicit an inappropriate response from the AI. Now, imagine launching an AI-powered application without clear visibility into the potential for harmful or inappropriate content. Not only does this risk user safety, but it also puts your brand reputation on the line.
To address the unique security risks specific to AI applications, the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications was created. This is an industry-driven standard that identifies the most critical security vulnerabilities specifically affecting LLM-based and generative AI applications. It’s designed to educate developers, security professionals, and organizations on the unique risks of deploying and managing these systems.
The stakes are even higher with new regulations being introduced:
Helping civil society monitor attacks with the CyberPeaceTracer and Cloudflare Email Security
Civil society organizations have always been at the forefront of humanitarian relief efforts, as well as safeguarding civil and human rights. These organizations play a large role in delivering services during crises, whether it is fighting climate change, support during natural disasters, providing health services to marginalized communities and more.
What do many of these organizations have in common? Many times, it’s cyber attacks from adversaries looking to steal sensitive information or disrupt their operations. Cloudflare has seen this firsthand when providing free cybersecurity services to vulnerable groups through programs like Project Galileo, and found that in aggregate, organizations protected under the project experience an average of 95 million attacks per day. While cyber attacks are a problem across all industries in the digital age, civil society organizations are disproportionately targeted, many times due to their advocacy, and because attackers know that they typically operate with limited resources. In most cases, these organizations don’t even know they have been attacked until it is too late.
Over the last 10 years of Project Galileo, we’ve had the opportunity to work more closely with leading civil society organizations. This has led to a number of exciting new partnerships, Continue reading
QUIC action: patching a broadcast address amplification vulnerability
Cloudflare was recently contacted by a group of anonymous security researchers who discovered a broadcast amplification vulnerability through their QUIC Internet measurement research. Our team collaborated with these researchers through our Public Bug Bounty program, and worked to fully patch a dangerous vulnerability that affected our infrastructure.
Since being notified about the vulnerability, we've implemented a mitigation to help secure our infrastructure. According to our analysis, we have fully patched this vulnerability and the amplification vector no longer exists.
QUIC is an Internet transport protocol that is encrypted by default. It offers equivalent features to TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and TLS (Transport Layer Security), while using a shorter handshake sequence that helps reduce connection establishment times. QUIC runs over UDP (User Datagram Protocol).
The researchers found that a single client QUIC Initial packet targeting a broadcast IP destination address could trigger a large response of initial packets. This manifested as both a server CPU amplification attack and a reflection amplification attack.
When using TCP and TLS there are two handshake interactions. First, is the TCP 3-way transport handshake. A client sends a SYN packet to a server, it responds with Continue reading
Cloudflare meets new Global Cross-Border Privacy standards
Cloudflare proudly leads the way with our approach to data privacy and the protection of personal information, and we’ve been an ardent supporter of the need for the free flow of data across jurisdictional borders. So today, on Data Privacy Day (also known internationally as Data Protection Day), we’re happy to announce that we’re adding our fourth and fifth privacy validations, and this time, they are global firsts! Cloudflare is the first organisation to announce that we have been successfully audited against the brand new Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules (Global CBPRs) for data controllers and the Global Privacy Rules for Processors (Global PRP). These validations demonstrate our support and adherence to global standards that provide for privacy-respecting data flows across jurisdictions. Organizations that have been successfully audited will be formally certified when the certifications officially launch, which we expect to happen later in 2025.
Our participation in the Global CBPRs and Global PRP joins our roster of privacy validations: we were one of the first cybersecurity organizations to certify to the international privacy standard ISO 27701:2019 when it was published, and in 2022 we also certified to the cloud privacy certification, ISO 27018:2019. In 2023, we added our third Continue reading
Cloudflare thwarts over 47 million cyberthreats against Jewish and Holocaust educational websites
January 27 marks the International Holocaust Remembrance Day — a solemn occasion to honor the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, along with countless others who fell victim to the Nazi regime's campaign of hatred and intolerance. This tragic chapter in human history serves as a stark reminder of the catastrophic consequences of prejudice and extremism.
The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of this infamous extermination camp.
As the world reflects on this dark period, a troubling resurgence of antisemitism underscores the importance of vigilance. This growing hatred has spilled into the digital realm, with cyberattacks increasingly targeting Jewish and Holocaust remembrance and educational websites — spaces dedicated to preserving historical truth and fostering awareness.
For this reason, here at Cloudflare, we began to publish annual reports covering cyberattacks that target these organizations. These cyberattacks include DDoS attacks as well as bot and application attacks. The insights and trends are based on websites protected by Cloudflare. This is our fourth report, and you can view our previous Holocaust Continue reading