This was a weekend of record-breaking DDoS attacks. Over the weekend, Cloudflare detected and mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (rps) with the largest exceeding 71 million rps. This is the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record, more than 35% […]
Tag Archives: security
Cloudflare's handling of a bug in interpreting IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses
In November 2022, our bug bounty program received a critical and very interesting report. The report stated that certain types of DNS records could be used to bypass some of our network policies and connect to ports on the loopback address (e.g. 127.0.0.1) of our servers. This post will explain how we dealt with the […]
CVE-2022-47929: traffic control noqueue no problem?
USER namespaces power the functionality of our favorite tools such as docker, podman, and kubernetes. We wrote about Linux namespaces back in June and explained them like this: Most of the namespaces are uncontroversial, like the UTS namespace which allows the host system to hide its hostname and time. Others are complex but straightforward – […]
Investing in security to protect data privacy
This post is also available in Deutsch, Français and Português. If you’ve made it to 2023 without ever receiving a notice that your personal information was compromised in a security breach, consider yourself lucky. In a best case scenario, bad actors only got your email address and name – information that won’t cause you a […]
Armed to Boot: an enhancement to Arm's Secure Boot chain
Over the last few years, there has been a rise in the number of attacks that affect how a computer boots. Most modern computers use a specification called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) that defines a software interface between an operating system (e.g. Windows) and platform firmware (e.g. disk drives, video cards). There are security […]
CIO Week 2023 recap
This post is also available in 日本語, 简体中文, Français, Deutsch and Español. In our Welcome to CIO Week 2023 post, we talked about wanting to start the year by celebrating the work Chief Information Officers do to keep their organizations safe and productive. Over the past week, you learned about announcements addressing all facets of […]
Input Validation for Website Security
Web forms are incredibly useful tools. They allow you to gather important information about potential clients and site visitors, collect comments and feedback, upload files, subscribe new users to your blog, or even collect payment details. But if your forms aren’t properly validating user inputs, you might be in for a nasty surprise: a variety […]
Introducing Cloudflare Access: Like BeyondCorp, But You Don’t Have To Be A Google Employee To Use It
Tell me if this sounds familiar: any connection from inside the corporate network is trusted and any connection from the outside is not. This is the security strategy used by most enterprises today. The problem is that once the firewall, or gateway, or VPN server creating this perimeter is breached, the attacker gets immediate, easy […]
Simple Cyber Security Tips (for your Parents)
Today, December 25th, Cloudflare offices around the world are taking a break. From San Francisco to London and Singapore; engineers have retreated home for the holidays (albeit with PagerDuty safely in arms reach, schedule permitting). Software engineering pro-tip: Do not, I repeat, do not deploy this week. That is how you end up debugging a […]
TLS 1.3 is going to save us all, and other reasons why IoT is still insecure
As I’m writing this, four DDoS attacks are ongoing and being automatically mitigated by Gatebot. Cloudflare’s job is to get attacked. Our network gets attacked constantly. Around the fall of 2016, we started seeing DDoS attacks that looked a little different than usual. One attack we saw around that time had traffic coming from 52,467 […]
