Archive

Category Archives for "Security"

Expanding our Microsoft collaboration: proactive and automated Zero Trust security for customers

Expanding our Microsoft collaboration: proactive and automated Zero Trust security for customers
Expanding our Microsoft collaboration: proactive and automated Zero Trust security for customers

As CIOs navigate the complexities of stitching together multiple solutions, we are extending our partnership with Microsoft to create one of the best Zero Trust solutions available. Today, we are announcing four new integrations between Azure AD and Cloudflare Zero Trust that reduce risk proactively. These integrated offerings increase automation allowing security teams to focus on threats versus implementation and maintenance.

What is Zero Trust and why is it important?

Zero Trust is an overused term in the industry and creates a lot of confusion. So, let's break it down. Zero Trust architecture emphasizes the “never trust, always verify” approach. One way to think about it is that in the traditional security perimeter or “castle and moat” model, you have access to all the rooms inside the building (e.g., apps) simply by having access to the main door (e.g., typically a VPN).  In the Zero Trust model you would need to obtain access to each locked room (or app) individually rather than only relying on access through the main door. Some key components of the Zero Trust model are identity e.g., Azure AD (who), apps e.g., a SAP instance or a custom Continue reading

Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks

Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks
Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks

Email is one of the most ubiquitous and also most exploited tools that businesses use every single day. Baiting users into clicking malicious links within an email has been a particularly long-standing tactic for the vast majority of bad actors, from the most sophisticated criminal organizations to the least experienced attackers.

Even though this is a commonly known approach to gain account access or commit fraud, users are still being tricked into clicking malicious links that, in many cases, lead to exploitation. The reason is simple: even the best trained users (and security solutions) cannot always distinguish a good link from a bad link.

On top of that, securing employees' mailboxes often results in multiple vendors, complex deployments, and a huge drain of resources.

Email Link Isolation turns Cloudflare Area 1 into the most comprehensive email security solution when it comes to protecting against phishing attacks. It rewrites links that could be exploited, keeps users vigilant by alerting them of the uncertainty around the website they’re about to visit, and protects against malware and vulnerabilities through the user-friendly Cloudflare Browser Isolation service. Also, in true Cloudflare fashion,  it’s a one-click deployment.

With more than a couple Continue reading

How Cloudflare Area 1 and DLP work together to protect data in email

How Cloudflare Area 1 and DLP work together to protect data in email
How Cloudflare Area 1 and DLP work together to protect data in email

Threat prevention is not limited to keeping external actors out, but also keeping sensitive data in. Most organizations do not realize how much confidential information resides within their email inboxes. Employees handle vast amounts of sensitive data on a daily basis, such as intellectual property, internal documentation, PII, or payment information and often share this information internally via email making email one of the largest locations confidential information is stored within a company. It comes as no shock that organizations worry about protecting the accidental or malicious egress of sensitive data and often address these concerns by instituting strong Data Loss Prevention policies. Cloudflare makes it easy for customers to manage the data in their email inboxes with Area 1 Email Security and Cloudflare One.

Cloudflare One, our SASE platform that delivers network-as-a-service (NaaS) with Zero Trust security natively built-in, connects users to enterprise resources, and offers a wide variety of opportunities to secure corporate traffic, including the inspection of data transferred to your corporate email. Area 1 email security, as part of our composable Cloudflare One platform, delivers the most complete data protection for your inbox and offers a cohesive solution when including additional services, such as Data Loss Continue reading

How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app

How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app
How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app

Let’s assume you manage a job advert site. On a daily basis job-seekers will be uploading their CVs, cover letters and other supplementary documents to your servers. What if someone tried to upload malware instead?

Today we’re making your security team job easier by providing a file content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users get blocked before they reach application servers.

Enter WAF Content Scanning.

If you are an enterprise customer, reach out to your account team to get access.

Making content scanning easy

At Cloudflare, we pride ourselves on making our products very easy to use. WAF Content Scanning was built with that goal in mind. The main requirement to use the Cloudflare WAF is that application traffic is proxying via the Cloudflare network. Once that is done, turning on Content Scanning requires a single API call.

Once on, the WAF will automatically detect any content being uploaded, and when found, scan it and provide the results for you to use when writing WAF Custom Rules or reviewing security analytics dashboards.

The entire process runs inline with your HTTP traffic and requires no change to your Continue reading

Coming Soon: Ask Me Anything!?

Well, maybe not *anything*, but almost anything is fair game. I’m delighted to share with you that, starting January 2023, I’m hosting a new “Ask JJX” column right here in the Packet Pushers community! This new column lets us interact in new and exciting ways, and truly have a conversation about the topics that matter […]

The post Coming Soon: Ask Me Anything!? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

2022 US midterm elections attack analysis

2022 US midterm elections attack analysis
2022 US midterm elections attack analysis

Through Cloudflare’s Impact programs, we provide cyber security products to help protect access to authoritative voting information and the security of sensitive voter data. Two core programs in this space are the Athenian Project, dedicated to protecting state and local governments that run elections, and Cloudflare for Campaigns, a project with a suite of Cloudflare products to secure political campaigns’ and state parties’ websites and internal teams.

However, the weeks ahead of the elections, and Election Day itself, were not entirely devoid of attacks. Using data from Cloudflare Radar, which showcases global Internet traffic, attack, and technology trends and insights, we can explore traffic patterns, attack types, and top attack sources associated with both Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns participants.

For both programs, overall traffic volume unsurprisingly ramped up as Election Day approached. SQL Injection (SQLi) and HTTP Anomaly attacks were the two largest categories of attacks mitigated by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), and the United States was the largest source of observed attacks — see more on this last point below.

Below, we explore the trends seen across both customer sets from October 1, 2022, through Election Day on November 8.

Athenian Project

Throughout Continue reading

Hedge 153: Security Perceptions and Multicloud Roundtable

Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ hang out at the hedge on this episode. The topics of discussion include our perception of security—does the way IT professionals treat security and privacy helpful for those who aren’t involved in the IT world? Do we discourage users from taking security seriously by making it so complex and hard to use? Our second topic is whether multicloud is being oversold for the average network operator.

download

Cloudflare is not affected by the OpenSSL vulnerabilities CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786

Cloudflare is not affected by the OpenSSL vulnerabilities CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786
Cloudflare is not affected by the OpenSSL vulnerabilities CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786

Yesterday, November 1, 2022, OpenSSL released version 3.0.7 to patch CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786, two HIGH risk vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL 3.0.x cryptographic library. Cloudflare is not affected by these vulnerabilities because we use BoringSSL in our products.

These vulnerabilities are memory corruption issues, in which attackers may be able to execute arbitrary code on a victim’s machine. CVE-2022-3602 was initially announced as a CRITICAL severity vulnerability, but it was downgraded to HIGH because it was deemed difficult to exploit with remote code execution (RCE). Unlike previous situations where users of OpenSSL were almost universally vulnerable, software that is using other versions of OpenSSL (like 1.1.1) are not vulnerable to this attack.

How do these issues affect clients and servers?

These vulnerabilities reside in the code responsible for X.509 certificate verification - most often executed on the client side to authenticate the server and the certificate presented. In order to be impacted by this vulnerability the victim (client or server) needs a few conditions to be true:

  • A malicious certificate needs to be signed by a Certificate Authority that the victim trusts.
  • The victim needs to validate the malicious certificate or ignore a Continue reading

On the ‘net: Privacy and Networking

The final three posts in my series on privacy for infrastructure engineers is up over at Packet Pushers. While privacy might not seem like a big deal to infrastructure folks, it really is an issue we should all be considering and addressing—if for no other reason than privacy and security are closely related topics. The primary “thing” you’re trying to secure when you think about networking is data—or rather, various forms of privacy.

Focusing on legal defensibility is the wrong way to look at privacy, or rather the wrong end of the stick.

What are some best practices network operators can follow to reduce their risk? The simplest way to think about best practices is to think about user rights and risks at each stage of the data lifecycle.

For the final post in this series, I’ll address two topics: the privacy implications of Domain Name System (DNS) queries, and the absolute necessity of having a plan for how to respond to a breach. Let’s start with DNS.

The RISC Deprogrammer

I should write up a larger technical document on this, but in the meanwhile is this short (-ish) blogpost. Everything you know about RISC is wrong. It's some weird nerd cult. Techies frequently mention RISC in conversation, with other techies nodding their head in agreement, but it's all wrong. Somehow everyone has been mind controlled to believe in wrong concepts.

An example is this recent blogpost which starts out saying that "RISC is a set of design principles". No, it wasn't. Let's start from this sort of viewpoint to discuss this odd cult.

What is RISC?

Because of the march of Moore's Law, every year, more and more parts of a computer could be included onto a single chip. When chip densities reached the point where we could almost fit an entire computer on a chip, designers made tradeoffs, discarding unimportant stuff to make the fit happen. They made tradeoffs, deciding what needed to be included, what needed to change, and what needed to be discarded.

RISC is a set of creative tradeoffs, meaningful at the time (early 1980s), but which were meaningless by the late 1990s.

The interesting parts of CPU evolution are the three decades from 1964 with Continue reading

Page Shield can now watch for malicious outbound connections made by third-party JavaScript code

Page Shield can now watch for malicious outbound connections made by third-party JavaScript code
Page Shield can now watch for malicious outbound connections made by third-party JavaScript code

Page Shield can now watch for malicious outbound connections made by third-party JavaScript code

Many websites use third party JavaScript libraries to cut development time by using pre-built features. Common examples include checkout services, analytics tools, or live chat integrations. Any one of these JavaScript libraries may be sending site visitors’ data to unknown locations.

If you manage a website, and you have ever wondered where end user data might be going and who has access to it, starting today, you can find out using Page Shield’s Connection Monitor.

Page Shield is our client side security solution that aims to detect malicious behavior and compromises that affect the browser environment directly, such as those that exploit vulnerabilities in third party JavaScript libraries.

Connection Monitor, available from today, is the latest addition to Page Shield and allows you to see outbound connections being made by your users’ browsers initiated by third party JavaScript added to your site. You can then review this information to ensure only appropriate third parties are receiving sensitive data.

Customers on our business and enterprise plans receive visibility in outbound connections provided by Connection Monitor. If you are using our Page Shield enterprise add-on, you also Continue reading

New Webinar: Internet Routing Security

I’m always in a bit of a bind when I get an invitation to speak at a security conference (after all, I know just enough about security to make a fool of myself), but when the organizers of the DEEP Conference invited me to talk about Internet routing security I simply couldn’t resist – the topic is dear and near to my heart, and I planned to do a related webinar for a very long time.

Even better, that conference would have been my first on-site presentation since the COVID-19 craze started, and I love going to Dalmatia (where the conference is taking place). Alas, it was not meant to be – I came down with high fever just days before the conference and had to cancel the talk.

New Webinar: Internet Routing Security

I’m always in a bit of a bind when I get an invitation to speak at a security conference (after all, I know just enough about security to make a fool of myself), but when the organizers of the DEEP Conference invited me to talk about Internet routing security I simply couldn’t resist – the topic is dear and near to my heart, and I planned to do a related webinar for a very long time.

Even better, that conference would have been my first on-site presentation since the COVID-19 craze started, and I love going to Dalmatia (where the conference is taking place). Alas, it was not meant to be – I came down with high fever just days before the conference and had to cancel the talk.

1 9 10 11 12 13 181