First round of French election: party attacks and a modest traffic dip

This post is also available in Français.

France is currently electing a new government through early legislative elections that began on Sunday, June 30, 2024, with a second round scheduled for July 7. In this blog, we show how Cloudflare blocked DDoS attacks targeting three different French political parties.

2024 has been dubbed “the year of elections,” with elections taking place in over 60 countries, as we have mentioned before (1, 2, 3). If you regularly follow the Cloudflare blog, you’re aware that we consistently cover election-related trends, including in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union and the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.

Recently in France, as in the early stages of the war in Ukraine and during EU elections in the Netherlands, political events have precipitated cyberattacks. In France, several DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) attacks targeted political parties involved in the elections over the past few days, with two parties hit just before the first round and another on election day itself.

The first political party, shown in yellow in the previous chart, experienced a DDoS attack on Continue reading

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier.

The popularity of generative AI has made the demand for content used to train models or run inference on skyrocket, and, although some AI companies clearly identify their web scraping bots, not all AI companies are being transparent. Google reportedly paid $60 million a year to license Reddit’s user generated content, Scarlett Johansson alleged OpenAI used her voice for their new personal assistant without her consent, and most recently, Perplexity has been accused of impersonating legitimate visitors in order to scrape content from websites. The value of original content in bulk has never been higher.
Last year, Cloudflare announced the ability for customers to easily block AI bots that behave well. These bots follow robots.txt, and don’t use unlicensed content to train their models or run inference for RAG applications using website data. Even though these AI bots follow the rules, Cloudflare customers overwhelmingly opt to block them.

We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do Continue reading

MUST READ: ChatGPT Is Bullshit

Bogdan Golab sent me a link to an (open access) article in Ethics and Information Technology arguing why ChatGPT is bullshit. Straight from the introduction:

Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

Have fun!

PP021: Critical Vulnerabilities, AI-Assisted Scams, Compromised VPNs, and More Security News

It’s an all-news episode for this week’s Packet Protector podcast. We cover critical vulnerabilities in the MOVEit file transfer software and in thousands of ASUS routers, and a remote code execution vulnerability in a Windows wireless driver that you really should patch. We discuss a Wall Street Journal article about how AI tools are helping... Read more »

HS077: Should IT Lead or Follow?

The evolving role of IT in business is the topic of lively discussion between co-hosts Johna Johnson and John Burke.  Johna argues that IT should align with business goals, acting as an executive assistant, while John believes IT should take a proactive leadership role, driving innovation and framing business problems. They explore the challenges IT... Read more »

Layer 8: A Semantic Networking Layer for the Age of AI

In the most famous line from the classic mockumentary “Spinal Tap,” Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist, points to an amplifier and notes the additional number on the dial, saying that it “goes up to 11.” Alas, “this one goes to eight” does not have quite the same ring, but it might be time to use this phrase to describe a new layer of the traditional networking stack — the semantic layer. The addition of Layer 8 is driven by AI applications and their new exigencies. The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model, a conceptual framework that has guided network design and communication for decades, is facing a new challenge in the age of AI. As AI continues to permeate various aspects of technology, including networking, the traditional seven layers of the OSI model may not be sufficient to capture the full requirements and realities of AI-driven networking. Layer 8 is my proposed extension to the OSI model that aims to address the unique requirements and capabilities of AI in the context of networking. Unlike the existing layers, which focus on the technical aspects of data transmission, Layer 8 is concerned with the semantic understanding and intelligent processing of the Continue reading

What’s the Future of Distributed Ledgers?

SEATTLE — Blockchain may no longer be at the peak of its hype cycle, but the technology is still sparking innovation, as real-life use cases emerge. Distributed ledgers (DLTs), for instance, which allow for the secure recording and transfer of digital assets without reliance on a centralized authority, have obvious advantages for financial organizations. DLTs are at the core of an emerging ecosystem built on open source. In this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at Open Source Summit North America, Hedera, and OSSNA keynote talk on DLTs with Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS. For DLTs, Baird said, “We have an open source ledger, the blockchain is open source, you can think of it like an operating system that’s open source. You can run programs on top of it that are open source, you can run programs on top of it that are not open source.” The layer built on top of all this is also open source. “We had to come up with an algorithm for how they’re going to talk Continue reading

NB485: A Final FU for Greg

Greg Ferro bids farewell to Network Break, and Drew Conry-Murray and Johna Till Johnson bid farewell to Greg. Of course, the podcast must go on, so we also cover some tech news. First, Nokia acquires optics maker Infinera, Broadcom brings new features to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and campus switch sales drop. A Microsoft subsidiary... Read more »

The Keynote Answers You Expect

Keynote Starfield

Good morning! How are you?

I’d like to talk about keynotes, again. You know, one of my favorite subjects. I’ve been watching them intently for the past few years just hoping that we’re going to see something different. As a technical analyst and practitioner I love to see and hear the details behind the technology that drive the way our IT companies develop. Yet every year I feel more and more disappointed by the way that keynotes take everything and push it into the stratosphere to get an 80,000 foot view of the technology. It’s almost like the keynotes aren’t written for practitioners. Why? The answer lies in the statement at the top of this post.

Perfunctory Performances

When most people ask someone how their day is going they’re not actually looking for a real response. They most certainly aren’t asking for details on how exactly the person’s day is going. They’re usually looking for one of two things:

  1. It’s going great.
  2. It could be better.

Any more than that drags someone down into a conversation that they don’t want to have. Asking someone about their day is a polite way of acknowledging them and making a bit of small Continue reading

Making Segment Routing user-friendly

Segment Routing was supposed to make MPLS easier and give more power to network operators. Sadly, vendors decided to make it harder by selling weird protocols and over-engineered controller bloatware.

MPLS is actually great

Despite some anti-MPLS marketing from SD-WAN …

AWS Networking Fundamentals

AWS Networking Fundamentals

In my opinion, learning cloud networking is easier compared to traditional networking. You’ll see why as we go through the posts. Even if you're completely new to the cloud, you can get a simple lab up and running within a few hours. You don't need physical devices, cables, or complex topologies to get started.

Of course, you won’t become an expert in a few months, but you will build a solid foundation from which you can grow. The key is to start small, understand the basics, and experiment as you go.

There are multiple cloud providers out there, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba Cloud, and so on. At a basic level, they all function the same from a networking point of view, though each has its own nuances and differences. As long as you're familiar with one provider, the knowledge is usually transferable. That said, our focus here is AWS. AWS has the largest market share in the cloud space, and it's also where I got started.

Audience

If you're brand new to AWS, don't worry. This post focuses on the basics of AWS networking. General networking knowledge is helpful but not required - I'll try to explain things Continue reading

Netlab Examples in GitHub Codespaces

A few days ago, someone asked me about the IPv4 next-hop details of running interface EBGP sessions. I pointed him to a blog post explaining them, adding, “And of course, you can test that in netlab.” A few minutes later, it hit me: instead of asking him to set up netlab locally, I could enable him to do that in a minute with GitHub codespaces.

Setting that up was easy: copy the .devcontainer directory from the BGP labs repository into the netlab examples repository and commit the change. After a short yak-shaving exercise (writing README files and rearranging a few folders), I successfully started the codespace and was ready for this blog post. There was just one gotcha…

Read more …

Netlab Examples in GitHub Codespaces

A few days ago, someone asked me about the IPv4 next-hop details of running interface EBGP sessions. I pointed him to a blog post explaining them, adding, “And of course, you can test that in netlab.” A few minutes later, it hit me: instead of asking him to set up netlab locally, I could enable him to do that in a minute with GitHub codespaces.

Setting that up was easy: copy the .devcontainer directory from the BGP labs repository into the netlab examples repository and commit the change. After a short yak-shaving exercise (writing README files and rearranging a few folders), I successfully started the codespace and was ready for this blog post. There was just one gotcha…

Read more …
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