Helping protect personal information in the cloud, all across the world
Cloudflare has achieved a new EU Cloud Code of Conduct privacy validation, demonstrating GDPR compliance to strengthen trust in cloud services
Internet privacy laws around the globe differ, and in recent years there’s been much written about cross-border data transfers. Many regulations require adequate protections to be in place before personal information flows around the world, as with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The law rightly sets a high bar for how organizations must carefully handle personal information, and in drafting the regulation lawmakers anticipated personal data crossing-borders: Chapter V of the regulation covers those transfers specifically.
Whilst transparency on where personal information is stored is important, it’s also critically important how personal information is handled, and how it is kept safe and secure. At Cloudflare, we believe in protecting the privacy of personal information across the world, and we give our customers the tools and the choice on how and where to process their data. Put simply, we require that data is handled and protected in the same, secure, and careful way, whether our customers choose to transfer data across the world, or for it to remain in one country.
And today we are proud to announce Continue reading
ChatGPT on BGP Routing Security
I wanted to include a few examples of BGP bugs causing widespread disruption in the Network Security Fallacies presentation. I tried to find what happened when someone announced beacon prefixes with unknown optional transitive attributes (which should have been passed without complaints but weren’t) without knowing when it happened or who did it.
Trying to find the answer on Google proved to be a Mission Impossible – regardless of how I structured my query, I got tons of results that seemed relevant to a subset of the search words but nowhere near what I was looking for. Maybe I would get luckier with a tool that’s supposed to have ingested all the world’s knowledge and seems to (according to overexcited claims) understand what it’s talking about.
DDoS DNS attacks are old-school, unsophisticated … and they’re back
SPONSORED: Ransomware may currently be the biggest bogeyman for cybersecurity pros, law enforcement, and governments, but it shouldn’t divert us from more traditional, but still very disruptive threats. …
DDoS DNS attacks are old-school, unsophisticated … and they’re back was written by Martin Courtney at The Next Platform.
Everything you might have missed during Security Week 2023
Security Week 2023 is officially in the books. In our welcome post last Saturday, I talked about Cloudflare’s years-long evolution from protecting websites, to protecting applications, to protecting people. Our goal this week was to help our customers solve a broader range of problems, reduce external points of vulnerability, and make their jobs easier.
We announced 34 new tools and integrations that will do just that. Combined, these announcement will help you do five key things faster and easier:
- Making it easier to deploy and manage Zero Trust everywhere
- Reducing the number of third parties customers must use
- Leverage machine learning to let humans focus on critical thinking
- Opening up more proprietary Cloudflare threat intelligence to our customers
- Making it harder for humans to make mistakes
And to help you respond to the most current attacks in real time, we reported on how we’re seeing scammers use the Silicon Valley Bank news to phish new victims, and what you can do to protect yourself.
In case you missed any of the announcements, take a look at the summary and navigation guide below.
Monday
Wildcard and multi-hostname support in Cloudflare Access
We are thrilled to announce the full support of wildcard and multi-hostname application definitions in Cloudflare Access. Until now, Access had limitations that restricted it to a single hostname or a limited set of wildcards. Before diving into these new features let’s review Cloudflare Access and its previous limitations around application definition.
Access and hostnames
Cloudflare Access is the gateway to applications, enforcing security policies based on identity, location, network, and device health. Previously, Access applications were defined as a single hostname. A hostname is a unique identifier assigned to a device connected to the internet, commonly used to identify a website, application, or server. For instance, "www.example.com" is a hostname.
Upon successful completion of the security checks, a user is granted access to the protected hostname via a cookie in their browser, in the form of a JSON Web Token (JWT). This cookie's session lasts for a specific period of time defined by the administrators and any request made to the hostname must have this cookie present.
However, a single hostname application definition was not sufficient in certain situations, particularly for organizations with Single Page Applications and/or hundreds of identical hostnames.
Many Single Page Applications have two Continue reading
Account Security Analytics and Events: better visibility over all domains
Cloudflare offers many security features like WAF, Bot management, DDoS, Zero Trust, and more! This suite of products are offered in the form of rules to give basic protection against common vulnerability attacks. These rules are usually configured and monitored per domain, which is very simple when we talk about one, two, maybe three domains (or what we call in Cloudflare’s terms, “zones”).
The zone-level overview sometimes is not time efficient
If you’re a Cloudflare customer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of domains under your control, you’d spend hours going through these domains one by one, monitoring and configuring all security features. We know that’s a pain, especially for our Enterprise customers. That’s why last September we announced the Account WAF, where you can create one security rule and have it applied to the configuration of all your zones at once!
Account WAF makes it easy to deploy security configurations. Following the same philosophy, we want to empower our customers by providing visibility over these configurations, or even better, visibility on all HTTP traffic.
Today, Cloudflare is offering holistic views on the security suite by launching Account Security Analytics and Account Security Events. Now, Continue reading
Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management
At the end of 2021 Cloudflare launched Security Center, a unified solution that brings together our suite of security products and unique Internet intelligence. It enables security teams to quickly identify potential security risks and threats to their organizations, map their attack surface and mitigate these risks with just a few clicks. While Security Center initially focused on application security, we are now adding crucial zero trust insights to further enhance its capabilities.
When your brand is loved and trusted, customers and prospects are looking forward to the emails you send them. Now picture them receiving an email from you: it has your brand, the subject is exciting, it has a link to register for something unique — how can they resist that opportunity?
But what if that email didn’t come from you? What if clicking on that link is a scam that takes them down the path of fraud or identity theft? And what if they think you did it? The truth is, even security minded people occasionally fall for well crafted spoof emails.
That poses a risk to your business and reputation. A risk you don’t want to take - no one does. Brand impersonation is a Continue reading
How we built DMARC Management using Cloudflare Workers
What are DMARC reports
DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It's an email authentication protocol that helps protect against email phishing and spoofing.
When an email is sent, DMARC allows the domain owner to set up a DNS record that specifies which authentication methods, such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), are used to verify the email's authenticity. When the email fails these authentication checks DMARC instructs the recipient's email provider on how to handle the message, either by quarantining it or rejecting it outright.
DMARC has become increasingly important in today's Internet, where email phishing and spoofing attacks are becoming more sophisticated and prevalent. By implementing DMARC, domain owners can protect their brand and their customers from the negative impacts of these attacks, including loss of trust, reputation damage, and financial loss.
In addition to protecting against phishing and spoofing attacks, DMARC also provides reporting capabilities. Domain owners can receive reports on email authentication activity, including which messages passed and failed DMARC checks, as well as where these messages originated from.
DMARC management involves the configuration and maintenance of DMARC policies for a domain. Effective DMARC management requires ongoing monitoring and analysis Continue reading
IBM Cloud works with Cloudflare to help clients modernize and deliver secured cloud infrastructure
In this blog post, we wanted to highlight some ways that Cloudflare and IBM Cloud work together to help drive product innovation and deliver services that address the needs of our mutual customers. On our blog, we often discuss exciting new product developments and how we are solving real-world problems in our effort to make the internet better and many of our customers and partners play an important role.
IBM Cloud and Cloudflare have been working together since 2018 to integrate Cloudflare application security and performance products natively into IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS) has customers across a wide range of industry verticals and geographic regions but they also have several specialist groups building unique service offerings.
The IBM Cloud team specializes in serving clients in highly regulated industries, aiming to ensure their resiliency, performance, security and compliance needs are met. One group that we’ve been working with recently is IBM Cloud for Financial Services. This group extends the capabilities of IBM Cloud to help serve the complex security and compliance needs of banks, financial institutions and fintech companies.
Bot Management
As malicious bot attacks get more sophisticated and manual mitigations become more onerous, a dynamic and adaptive Continue reading
Advantages of Using Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM) with EBGP
A few weeks ago I described why EBGP TCP packets have TTL set to one (unless you configured EBGP multihop). Although some people claim that (like NAT) it could be a security feature, it’s not a good one. Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM, described in RFC 5082) is much better.
Most BGP implementations set TTL field in outgoing EBGP packets to one. That prevents a remote intruder that manages to hijack a host route to an adjacent EBGP peer from forming a BGP session as the TCP replies get lost the moment they hit the first router in the path.
Announcing Cloudflare Fraud Detection
The world changed when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Everything moved online to a much greater degree: school, work, and, surprisingly, fraud. Although some degree of online fraud has existed for decades, the Federal Trade Commission reported consumers lost almost $8.8 billion in fraud in 2022 (an over 400% increase since 2019) and the continuation of a disturbing trend. People continue to spend more time alone than ever before, and that time alone makes them not just more targeted, but also more vulnerable to fraud. Companies are falling victim to these trends just as much as individuals: according to PWC’s Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey, more than half of companies with at least $10 billion in revenue experienced some sort of digital fraud.
This is a familiar story in the world of bot attacks. Cloudflare Bot Management helps customers identify the automated tools behind online fraud, but it’s important to note that not all fraud is committed by bots. If the target is valuable enough, bad actors will contract out the exploitation of online applications to real people. Security teams need to look at more than just bots to better secure online applications and tackle modern, online fraud.
Announcing WAF Attack Score Lite and Security Analytics for business customers
In December 2022 we announced the general availability of the WAF Attack Score. The initial release was for our Enterprise customers, but we always had the belief that this product should be enabled for more users. Today we’re announcing “WAF Attack Score Lite” and “Security Analytics” for our Business plan customers.
Looking back on “What is WAF Attack Score and Security Analytics?”
Vulnerabilities on the Internet appear almost on a daily basis. The CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures) program has a list with over 197,000 records to track disclosed vulnerabilities.
That makes it really hard for web application owners to harden and update their system regularly, especially when we talk about critical libraries and the exploitation damage that can happen in case of information leak. That’s why web application owners tend to use WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) to protect their online presence.
Most WAFs use signature-based detections, which are rules created based on specific attacks that we know about. The signature-based method is very fast, has a low rate of false positives (these are the requests that are categorized as attack when they are actually legitimate), and is very efficient with most of the attack categories we know. However, Continue reading
How sophisticated scammers and phishers are preying on customers of Silicon Valley Bank
By now, the news about what happened at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) leading up to its collapse and takeover by the US Federal Government is well known. The rapid speed with which the collapse took place was surprising to many and the impact on organizations, both large and small, is expected to last a while.
Unfortunately, where everyone sees a tragic situation, threat actors see opportunity. We have seen this time and again - in order to breach trust and trick unsuspecting victims, threat actors overwhelmingly use topical events as lures. These follow the news cycle or known high profile events (The Super Bowl, March Madness, Tax Day, Black Friday sales, COVID-19, and on and on), since there is a greater likelihood of users falling for messages referencing what’s top of mind at any given moment.
The SVB news cycle makes for a similarly compelling topical event that threat actors can take advantage of; and it's crucial that organizations bolster their awareness campaigns and technical controls to help counter the eventual use of these tactics in upcoming attacks. It’s tragic that even as the FDIC is guaranteeing that SVB customers’ money is safe, bad actors are attempting to steal that Continue reading
Cloudflare One DLP integrates with Microsoft Information Protection labels
The crown jewels for an organization are often data, and the first step in protection should be locating where the most critical information lives. Yet, maintaining a thorough inventory of sensitive data is harder than it seems and generally a massive lift for security teams. To help overcome data security troubles, Microsoft offers their customers data classification and protection tools. One popular option are the sensitivity labels available with Microsoft Purview Information Protection. However, customers need the ability to track sensitive data movement even as it migrates beyond the visibility of Microsoft.
Today, we are excited to announce that Cloudflare One now offers Data Loss Prevention (DLP) detections for Microsoft Purview Information Protection labels. Simply integrate with your Microsoft account, retrieve your labels, and build rules to guide the movement of your labeled data. This extends the power of Microsoft’s labels to any of your corporate traffic in just a few clicks.
Data Classification with Microsoft Labels
Every organization has a wealth of data to manage, from publicly accessible data, like documentation, to internal data, like the launch date of a new product. Then, of course, there is the data requiring the highest levels of protection, such as customer PII. Continue reading
The state of application security in 2023
One year ago we published our first Application Security Report. For Security Week 2023, we are providing updated insights and trends around mitigated traffic, bot and API traffic, and account takeover attacks.
Cloudflare has grown significantly over the last year. In February 2023, Netcraft noted that Cloudflare had become the most commonly used web server vendor within the top million sites at the start of 2023, and continues to grow, reaching a 21.71% market share, up from 19.4% in February 2022.
This continued growth now equates to Cloudflare handling over 45 million HTTP requests/second on average (up from 32 million last year), with more than 61 million HTTP requests/second at peak. DNS queries handled by the network are also growing and stand at approximately 24.6 million queries/second. All of this traffic flow gives us an unprecedented view into Internet trends.
Before we dive in, we need to define our terms.
Definitions
Throughout this report, we will refer to the following terms:
- Mitigated traffic: any eyeball HTTP* request that had a “terminating” action applied to it by the Cloudflare platform. These include the following actions:
BLOCK,CHALLENGE,JS_CHALLENGEandMANAGED_CHALLENGE. This does not include Continue reading
Scan and secure Atlassian with Cloudflare CASB
As part of Security Week, two new integrations are coming to Cloudflare CASB, one for Atlassian Confluence and the other for Atlassian Jira.
We’re excited to launch support for these two new SaaS applications (in addition to those we already support) given the reliance that we’ve seen organizations from around the world place in them for streamlined, end-to-end project management.
Let’s dive into what Cloudflare Zero Trust customers can expect from these new integrations.
CASB: Security for your SaaS apps
First, a quick recap. CASB, or Cloud Access Security Broker, is one of Cloudflare’s newer offerings, released last September to provide security operators - CISOs and security engineers - clear visibility and administrative control over the security of their SaaS apps.
Whether it’s Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Box, GitHub, or Atlassian (whew!), CASB can easily connect and scan these apps for critical security issues, and provide users an exhaustive list of identified problems, organized for triage.
Scan Confluence with Cloudflare CASB
Over time, Atlassian Confluence has become the go-to collaboration platform for teams to create, organize, and share content, such as documents, notes, and meeting minutes. However, from a security perspective, Confluence's flexibility and wide Continue reading
Securing the NSX management plane against exploits
Helping organizations protect their assets and infrastructure from evolving attack tactics and techniques is a priority at VMware. API-focused ransomware attacks have become an all-too-common trend, and we recommend that customers take extra care to reduce their attack surface by deploying NSX Manager — and any other manager console — in a hardened manner.
Management infrastructure and common services typically allow broad access to other potentially more valuable resources within an organization, which in turn provides malicious actors with convenient platforms from which they can launch more damaging attacks. To manage that risk, VMware recommends the following steps to protect your management networks and services deployed within those networks:
- Do not expose NSX Manager to the internet: Like any other management console, NSX Manager should be installed within your internal network and accessed remotely only through a secure VPN connection.
- Use strong authentication methods: Ensure that strong authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication, are used for all NSX Manager logins.
- Use secure communication protocols: Use secure communication protocols, such as SSL/TLS, to protect the communication between NSX Manager and other components in the environment.
- Implement network segmentation: Segment the network to limit the Continue reading