Denial of Services as a Service

Hacking isn’t new. If you follow the 2600 Magazine culture of know the name Mitnick or Draper you know that hacking has been a part of systems as long as their have been systems. What has changed in recent years is the malicious aspect of what’s going on in the acts themselves. The pioneers of hacking culture were focused on short term gains or personal exploitation. It was more about proving you could break into a system and getting the side benefit of free phone calls or an untraceable mobile device. Today’s hacking cultures are driven by massive amounts of theft and exploitation of resources to a degree that would make any traditional hacker blush.

It’s much like the difference between petty street crime and “organized” crime. With a patron and a purpose, the organizers of the individual members can coordinate to accomplish a bigger goal than was ever thought possible by the person on the street. Just like a wolf pack or jackals, you can take down a much bigger target with come coordination. I talked a little bit about how the targets were going to start changing almost seven years ago and how we needed to start figuring Continue reading

Securing Memory at EPYC Scale

Security is a serious business, one that we do not take lightly at Cloudflare. We have invested a lot of effort into ensuring that our services, both external and internal, are protected by meeting or exceeding industry best practices. Encryption is a huge part of our strategy as it is embedded in nearly every process we have. At Cloudflare, we encrypt data both in transit (on the network) and at rest (on the disk). Both practices address some of the most common vectors used to exfiltrate information and these measures serve to protect sensitive data from attackers but,  what about data currently in use?

Can encryption or any technology eliminate all threats? No, but as Infrastructure Security, it’s our job to consider worst-case scenarios. For example, what if someone were to steal a server from one of our data centers? How can we leverage the most reliable, cutting edge, innovative technology to secure all data on that host if it were in the wrong hands? Would it be protected? And, in particular, what about the server’s RAM?

Data in random access memory (RAM) is usually stored in the clear. This can leave data vulnerable to software or hardware probing by Continue reading

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Akamai: The Financial Sector Is Seeing More APIs-Based Attacks

Cyberattackers are now increasingly targeting APIs, especially in the financial sector, according to content delivery network Akamai’s between 15% and 30% of all web traffic. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company hAndy Ellis neatly summarized the resultsemail to VentureBeat, Akamai explained some of the advantages of automation: criminals “use bots and tools that allow threading, or multiple simultaneous connections, to attempt multiple logins at once.” And by targeting APIs, “they hope to avoid some front-end defenses and speed up their validation times.” A recent Franck V. on 

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Introducing Secrets and Environment Variables to Cloudflare Workers

The Workers team here at Cloudflare has been hard at work shipping a bunch of new features in the last year and we’ve seen some amazing things built with the tools we’ve provided. However, as my uncle once said, with great serverless platform growth comes great responsibility.

One of the ways we can help is by ensuring that deploying and maintaining your Workers scripts is a low risk endeavor. Rotating a set of API keys shouldn’t require risking downtime through code edits and redeployments and in some cases it may not make sense for the developer writing the script to know the actual API key value at all. To help tackle this problem, we’re releasing Secrets and Environment Variables to the Wrangler CLI and Workers Dashboard.

Supporting secrets

As we started to design support for secrets in Workers we had a sense that this was already a big concern for a lot of our users but we wanted to learn about all of the use cases to ensure we were building the right thing. We headed to the community forums, twitter, and the inbox of Louis Grace, business development representative extraordinaire, for some anecdotes about Secrets usage. We also sent Continue reading

NTT Fuels Academic Research Into Security

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Security that’s Designed for the Modern Data Center

The last 12 months have been incredibly exciting for the security business at VMware. Last year at RSA Conference 2019, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined our Intrinsic Security strategy in his keynote presentation, “3 Things the Security Industry Isn’t Talking About”. We also announced the VMware Service-defined Firewall, a stateful Layer 7 data center firewall. As pioneers of micro-segmentation, the Service-defined Firewall extended our leadership in protecting east-west traffic in the data center.

Later in the year, we announced two major acquisitions –Avi Networks and Carbon Black. The acquisition of Carbon Black brought to VMware an industry-leading endpoint security platform, and made the entire industry take notice of VMware’s intentions to transform security. With Avi Networks, we acquired a software-defined, elastic, and high-performance load balancer that comes equipped with a full-featured web application firewall (WAF). Maintaining the momentum in building out our security portfolio for the digital enterprise, we announced the VMware NSX Distributed Intrusion Detection and Prevention System which will bring advanced threat controls to the Service-defined Firewall.

At RSA Conference 2020, we are introducing VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation, a modern data center security solution for today’s private and public clouds. This solution will include VMware Carbon Continue reading