Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Today, we’re excited to expand our recent Unified Risk Posture announcement with more information on our latest integrations with CrowdStrike. We previously shared that our CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM integration allows for deeper analysis and further investigations by unifying first- and third-party data, native threat intelligence, AI, and workflow automation to allow your security teams to focus on work that matters.

The Internet can feel like magic. When you load a webpage in your browser, many simultaneous requests for data fly back and forth to remote servers. Then, often in less than one second, a website appears. Many people know that DNS is used to look up a hostname, and resolve it to an IP address, but fewer understand how data flows from your home network to the network that controls the IP address of the web server.

On August 13th, 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the first three cryptographic standards designed to resist an attack from quantum computers: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. This announcement marks a significant milestone for ensuring that today’s communications remain secure in a future world where large-scale quantum computers are a reality.

Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.

For many years, Cloudflare has used advanced fingerprinting techniques to help block online threats, in products like our DDoS engine, our WAF, and Bot Management. For the purposes of Bot Management, fingerprinting characteristic elements of client software help us quickly identify what kind of software is making an HTTP request. It’s an efficient and accurate way to differentiate a browser from a Python script, while preserving user privacy.

In today’s world, technology is quickly evolving and some practices that were once considered the gold standard are quickly becoming outdated. At Cloudflare, we stay close to industry changes to ensure that we can provide the best solutions to our customers. One practice that we’re continuing to see in use that no longer serves its original purpose is certificate pinning.

We made our WAF Machine Learning models 5.5x faster, reducing execution time by approximately 82%, from 1519 to 275 microseconds! Read on to find out how we achieved this remarkable improvement. WAF Attack Score is Cloudflare's machine learning (ML)-powered layer built on top of our Web Application Firewall (WAF). Its goal is to complement the WAF and detect attack bypasses that we haven't encountered before.

Over the last twelve months, the Internet security landscape has changed dramatically. Geopolitical uncertainty, coupled with an active 2024 voting season in many countries across the world, has led to a substantial increase in malicious traffic activity across the Internet. In this report, we take a look at Cloudflare’s perspective on Internet application security. This report is the fourth edition of our Application Security Report and is an official update to our Q2 2023 report.

The MD5 cryptographic hash function was first broken in 2004, when researchers demonstrated the first MD5 collision, namely two different messages X1 and X2 where MD5(X1) = MD5 (X2). Over the years, attacks on MD5 have only continued to improve, getting faster and more effective against real protocols. But despite continuous advancements in cryptography, MD5 has lurked in network protocols for years, and is still playing a critical role in some protocols even today.