How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs
You go to a website or service, but before access is granted, there’s a visual challenge that forces you to select bikes, buses or traffic lights in a set of images. That can be an exasperating experience. Now, if you have iOS 16 on your iPhone, those days could be over and are just a one-time toggle enabled away.
CAPTCHA = "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"
In 2021 and 2022, we took direct steps to end the madness that wastes humanity about 500 years per day called CAPTCHAs, that have been making sure you’re human and not a bot. In August 2022, we announced Private Access Tokens. With that, we’re able to eliminate CAPTCHAs on iPhones, iPads and Macs (and more to come) with open privacy-preserving standards.
On September 12, iOS 16 became generally available (iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 should arrive in October) and on the settings of your device there’s a toggle that can enable the Private Access Token (PAT) technology that will eliminate the need for those CAPTCHAs, and automatically validate that you are a real human visiting a site. If you already have iOS 16, here’s what you should Continue reading
API Endpoint Management and Metrics are now GA
The Internet is an endless flow of conversations between computers. These conversations, the constant exchange of information from one computer to another, are what allow us to interact with the Internet as we know it. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the vital channels that carry these conversations, and their usage is quickly growing: in fact, more than half of the traffic handled by Cloudflare is for APIs, and this is increasing twice as fast as traditional web traffic.
In March, we announced that we’re expanding our API Shield into a full API Gateway to make it easy for our customers to protect and manage those conversations. We already offer several features that allow you to secure your endpoints, but there’s more to endpoints than their security. It can be difficult to keep track of many endpoints over time and understand how they’re performing. Customers deserve to see what’s going on with their API-driven domains and have the ability to manage their endpoints.
Today, we’re excited to announce that the ability to save, update, and monitor the performance of all your API endpoints is now generally available to API Shield customers. This includes key performance metrics like latency, error rate, and Continue reading
Cloudflare Area 1 – how the best email security keeps getting better
On February 23, 2022, after being a customer for two years and seeing phishing attacks virtually disappear from our employee’s mailboxes, Cloudflare announced the acquisition of Area 1 Security.
Thanks to its unique technology (more on that below) Cloudflare Area 1 can proactively identify and protect against phishing campaigns before they happen, and potentially prevent the 90%+ of all cyberattacks that Deloitte research identified as starting with an email. All with little to no impact on employee productivity.
But preventing 90% of the attacks is not enough, and that’s why Cloudflare Area 1 email security is part of our Zero Trust platform. Here’s what’s new.
Email Security on your Cloudflare Dashboard
Starting today you will find a dedicated Email Security section on your Cloudflare dashboard. That’s the easiest way for any Cloudflare customer to get familiar with and start using Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security.
From there you can easily request a trial, which gives you access to the full product for 30 days.
Our team will guide you through the setup, which will take just a few minutes. That’s the beauty of not having to install and tune a Secure Email Gateway (SEG). You can simply configure Area Continue reading
Cloudforce One is now generally available: empower your security team with threat data, tooling, and access to industry experts
Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team, Cloudforce One, is now open for business and has begun conducting threat briefings. Access to the team is available via an add-on subscription, and includes threat data and briefings, security tools, and the ability to make requests for information (RFIs) to the team.
Fill out this form or contact your account team to learn more.
Subscriptions come in two packages, and are priced based on number of employees: “Premier” includes our full history of threat data, bundled RFIs, and an API quota designed to support integrations with SIEMs. “Core” level includes reduced history and quotas. Both packages include access to all available security tools, including a threat investigation portal and sinkholes-as-a-service.
If you’re an enterprise customer interested in understanding the type of threat briefings that Cloudforce One customers receive, you can register here for “YackingYeti: How a Russian threat group targets Ukraine—and the world”, scheduled for October 12. The briefing will include Q&A with Blake Darché, head of Cloudforce One, and an opportunity to learn more about the team and offering.
Requests for Information (RFIs) and Briefings
The Cloudforce One team is composed of analysts assigned to five subteams: Malware Analysis, Threat Continue reading
Video: Testing IPv6 RA Guard
After discussing rogue IPv6 RA challenges and the million ways one can circumvent IPv6 RA guard with IPv6 extension headers, Christopher Werny focused on practical aspects of this thorny topic: how can we test IPv6 RA Guard implementations and how good are they?
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.
New Trident 4C ASIC Includes Real-Time Threat Analysis Option
Broadcom has announced a new ASIC in the Trident family that can monitor flows in real time to identify anomalies that may indicate DDoS attacks, port scans, data exfiltration, and other threats, but has yet to announce security partners to take advantage of this capability.
The post New Trident 4C ASIC Includes Real-Time Threat Analysis Option appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Cloudflare named a Leader by Gartner
Gartner has recognised Cloudflare as a Leader in the 2022 "Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)" report that evaluated 11 vendors for their ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.
You can register for a complimentary copy of the report here.
We believe this achievement highlights our continued commitment and investment in this space as we aim to provide better and more effective security solutions to our users and customers.
Keeping up with application security
With over 36 million HTTP requests per second being processed by the Cloudflare global network we get unprecedented visibility into network patterns and attack vectors. This scale allows us to effectively differentiate clean traffic from malicious, resulting in about 1 in every 10 HTTP requests proxied by Cloudflare being mitigated at the edge by our WAAP portfolio.
Visibility is not enough, and as new use cases and patterns emerge, we invest in research and new product development. For example, API traffic is increasing (55%+ of total traffic) and we don’t expect this trend to slow down. To help customers with these new workloads, our API Gateway builds upon our WAF to provide better visibility and mitigations for well-structured API traffic for Continue reading
Introducing thresholds in Security Event Alerting: a z-score love story
Today we are excited to announce thresholds for our Security Event Alerts: a new and improved way of detecting anomalous spikes of security events on your Internet properties. Previously, our calculations were based on z-score methodology alone, which was able to determine most of the significant spikes. By introducing a threshold, we are able to make alerts more accurate and only notify you when it truly matters. One can think of it as a romance between the two strategies. This is the story of how they met.
Author’s note: as an intern at Cloudflare I got to work on this project from start to finish from investigation all the way to the final product.
Once upon a time
In the beginning, there were Security Event Alerts. Security Event Alerts are notifications that are sent whenever we detect a threat to your Internet property. As the name suggests, they track the number of security events, which are requests to your application that match security rules. For example, you can configure a security rule that blocks access from certain countries. Every time a user from that country tries to access your Internet property, it will log as a security event. While a Continue reading
2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”
In 2022, cybersecurity is a must-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack with difficult to deal consequences. And with a war in Europe (Ukraine) still going on, cyberwar also doesn’t show signs of stopping in a time when there never were so many people online, 4.95 billion in early 2022, 62.5% of the world’s total population (estimates say it grew around 4% during 2021 and 7.3% in 2020).
Throughout the year we, at Cloudflare, have been making new announcements of products, solutions and initiatives that highlight the way we have been preventing, mitigating and constantly learning, over the years, with several thousands of small and big cyberattacks. Right now, we block an average of 124 billion cyber threats per day. The more we deal with attacks, the more we know how to stop them, and the easier it gets to find and deal with new threats — and for customers to forget we’re there, protecting them.
In 2022, we have been onboarding many customers while they’re being attacked, something we know well from the past (Wikimedia/Wikipedia or Eurovision are just two case-studies of many, Continue reading
The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it
Yesterday, August 8, 2022, Twilio shared that they’d been compromised by a targeted phishing attack. Around the same time as Twilio was attacked, we saw an attack with very similar characteristics also targeting Cloudflare’s employees. While individual employees did fall for the phishing messages, we were able to thwart the attack through our own use of Cloudflare One products, and physical security keys issued to every employee that are required to access all our applications.
We have confirmed that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Our Cloudforce One threat intelligence team was able to perform additional analysis to further dissect the mechanism of the attack and gather critical evidence to assist in tracking down the attacker.
This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached. Given that the attacker is targeting multiple organizations, we wanted to share here a rundown of exactly what we saw in order to help other companies recognize and mitigate this attack.
Targeted Text Messages
On July 20, 2022, the Cloudflare Security team received reports of employees receiving legitimate-looking text messages pointing to what appeared to be a Cloudflare Okta login Continue reading
1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private
It’s a Saturday night. You open your browser, looking for nearby pizza spots that are open. If the search goes as intended, your browser will show you results that are within a few miles, often based on the assumed location of your IP address. At Cloudflare, we affectionately call this type of geolocation accuracy the “pizza test”. When you use a Cloudflare product that sits between you and the Internet (for example, WARP), it’s one of the ways we work to balance user experience and privacy. Too inaccurate and you’re getting pizza places from a neighboring country; too accurate and you’re reducing the privacy benefits of obscuring your location.
With that in mind, we’re excited to announce two major improvements to our 1.1.1.1 + WARP apps: first, an improvement to how we ensure search results and other geographically-aware Internet activity work without compromising your privacy, and second, a larger network with more locations available to WARP+ subscribers, powering even speedier connections to our global network.
A better Internet browsing experience for every WARP user
When we originally built the 1.1.1.1+ WARP mobile app, we wanted to create a consumer-friendly way to connect to Continue reading
Network RPA Compliance and Security Use Cases: Gluware LiveStream June 28, 2022 (6/7) – Video
The Gluware application suite that includes Device Manager, Config Drift and Audit, OS Manager and Config Modeling provide no-code automation to enable and maintain compliance and enhance security. Now, Network RPA enables defining automated end-to-end processes that ensure policies and procedures are executed manually, scheduled or event-driven providing continuous compliance and improved security posture. Host […]
The post Network RPA Compliance and Security Use Cases: Gluware LiveStream June 28, 2022 (6/7) – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Privacy for Providers
While this talk is titled privacy for providers, it really applies to just about every network operator. This is meant to open a conversation on the topic, rather than providing definitive answers. I start by looking at some of the kinds of information network operators work with, and whether this information can or should be considered “private.” In the second part of the talk, I work through some of the various ways network operators might want to consider when handling private information.
Getting Tough with Cyberinsurance
I’ve been hearing a lot of claims recently about how companies are starting to rely more and more on cyberinsurance policies to cover them in the event of a breach or other form of disaster. While I’m a fan of insurance policies in general I think the companies trying to rely on these payouts to avoid doing any real security work is going to be a big surprise to them in the future.
Due Diligence
The first issue that I see is that companies are so worried about getting breached that they think taking out big insurance policies are the key to avoiding any big liability. Think about an organization that holds personally identifiable information (PII) and how likely it is that they would get sued in the event of a breach. The idea is that cyberinsurance would pay out for the breach and be used as a way to pay off the damages in a lawsuit.
The issue I have with this is that companies are expecting to get paid. They see cyberinsurance as a guaranteed payout instead of a last resort. In the initial days of taking out these big policies the insurers were happy to pay out Continue reading
Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable
Last year during CIO week, we announced Page Shield in general availability. Today, we talk about improvements we’ve made to help Page Shield users focus on the highest impact scripts and get more value out of the product. In this post we go over improvements to script status, metadata and categorization.
What is Page Shield?
Page Shield protects website owners and visitors against malicious 3rd party JavaScript. JavaScript can be leveraged in a number of malicious ways: browser-side crypto mining, data exfiltration and malware injection to mention a few.
For example a single hijacked JavaScript can expose millions of user’s credit card details across a range of websites to a malicious actor. The bad actor would scrape details by leveraging a compromised JavaScript library, skimming inputs to a form and exfiltrating this to a 3rd party endpoint under their control.
Today Page Shield partially relies on Content Security Policies (CSP), a browser native framework that can be used to control and gain visibility of which scripts are allowed to load on pages (while also reporting on any violations). We use these violation reports to provide detailed information in the Cloudflare dashboard regarding scripts being loaded by end-user browsers.
Page Shield Continue reading
Is Security A Feature Or A Product?
This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on July 9, 2019. Premise: I would be cautious about a vendor who sells security as a product or a critical/primary feature. Security-as-a-product is coming to an end. We need to return to making the things we already have work efficiently. There is only so […]
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