Generative AI has captured the imagination of the world by being able to produce poetry, screenplays, or imagery. These tools can be used to improve human productivity for good causes, but they can also be employed by malicious actors to carry out sophisticated attacks. We are witnessing phishing attacks and social engineering becoming more sophisticated as attackers tap into powerful new tools to generate credible content or interact with humans as if it was a real person.

Today, Cloudflare is announcing the development of Firewall for AI, a protection layer that can be deployed in front of Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify abuses before they reach the models. While AI models, and specifically LLMs, are surging, customers tell us that they are concerned about the best strategies to secure their own LLMs. Using LLMs as part of Internet-connected applications introduces new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by bad actors.

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and seventeen international partners are helping shape best practices for the technology industry with their ‘Secure by Design’ principles. The aim is to encourage software manufacturers to not only make security an integral part of their products’ development, but to also design products with strong security capabilities that are configured by default.

Cloudflare has been part of a multivendor, industry-wide effort to mitigate two critical DNSSEC vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities exposed significant risks to critical infrastructures that provide DNS resolution services. Cloudflare provides DNS resolution for anyone to use for free with our public resolver 1.1.1.1 service. Mitigations for Cloudflare’s public resolver 1.1.1.1 service were applied before these vulnerabilities were disclosed publicly.

Cloudflare’s Bot Management is used by organizations around the world to proactively detect and mitigate automated bot traffic. To do this, Cloudflare leverages machine learning models that help predict whether a particular HTTP request is coming from a bot or not, and further distinguishes between benign and malicious bots. Cloudflare serves over 55 million HTTP requests per second — so our machine learning models need to run at Cloudflare scale.

As more organizations collectively progress toward adopting a SASE architecture, it has become clear that the traditional SASE market definition (SSE + SD-WAN) is not enough. It forces some teams to work with multiple vendors to address their specific needs, introducing performance and security tradeoffs. More worrisome, it draws focus more to a checklist of services than a vendor’s underlying architecture.

Just in time for Data Privacy Day 2024 on January 28, the EU Commission is calling for evidence to understand how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been functioning now that we’re nearing the 6th anniversary of the regulation coming into force. We’re so glad they asked, because we have some thoughts. And what better way to celebrate privacy day than by discussing whether the application of the GDPR has actually done anything to improve people’s privacy?

Most WAF providers rely on reactive methods, responding to vulnerabilities after they have been discovered and exploited. However, we believe in proactively addressing potential risks, and using AI to achieve this. Today we are sharing a recent example of a critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887) and how Cloudflare's Attack Score powered by AI, and Emergency Rules in the WAF have countered this threat.

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Cloudflare’s DDoS Threat Report. This edition covers DDoS trends and key findings for the fourth and final quarter of the year 2023, complete with a review of major trends throughout the year.

You may know Cloudflare as the company powering nearly 20% of the web. But powering and protecting websites and static content is only a fraction of what we do. In fact, well over half of the dynamic traffic on our network consists not of web pages, but of Application Programming Interface (API) traffic — the plumbing that makes technology work.