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Under-resourced organizations that are vital to the basic functioning of our global communities face relentless cyber attacks, threatening basic needs for health, safety and security.
Cloudflare’s mission is to help make a better Internet. Starting December 13, 2022, we will help support these vulnerable infrastructure by providing our enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity solution to them at no cost, with no time limit.
It is our pleasure to introduce our newest Impact initiative: Project Safekeeping.
Small targets, devastating impacts
Critical infrastructure is an obvious target for cyber attack: by its very definition, these are the organizations and systems that are crucial for the functioning of our society and economy. As such, these organizations cannot have prolonged interruptions in service, or risk having sensitive data exposed.
Our conversations over the past few months with government officials in Australia, Germany, Japan, Portugal, and the United Kingdom show that they are focused on the threat to critical infrastructure, but resource constraints mean that their attention is on protecting large organizations – immense financial institutions, hospital networks, oil pipelines, and airports. Yet, the small critical infrastructure organizations that are the foundation of our communities are also at risk: the neighborhood hospital, water treatment facility, and local energy provider that fulfill our fundamental needs. We tend to ignore the small-yet-vitally-important companies that form the supply chains of our nationwide critical systems.
Unlike large organizations, smaller organizations typically do not have the capacity to manage relentless cyber attacks – usually operating on shoestring budgets, they do not have security personnel, threat insight teams, or the latest technology to keep their organizations secure. The numerous real life examples of cyber attacks against these small but vital organizations best illustrate the devastating impacts: in Japan, ransomware shut down a hospital’s access to patient records for nearly two months, halting the hospital’s ability to accept any new patients, including emergency patients; and in Germany, ransomware compromised a local county’s IT systems and no local public services could be provided to citizens for weeks, while the county is still struggling with the aftermath of the attack one year on.
Project Safekeeping: protecting global vulnerable critical infrastructure with Zero Trust
We at Cloudflare believe in helping to build a better Internet, for everyone. And we think that the welfare of our local communities should not be at risk because of the budget and operational constraints of these small and vulnerable entities. We think that we are particularly well-suited to help: Cloudflare is a global cybersecurity provider that blocked an average of 126 billion cyber threats each day in Q3 2022. And with Project Galileo and the Athenian Project, we have rich experience supporting organizations that are particularly vulnerable to cyber threats and lack the resources to protect themselves.
We want our support to be meaningful in order to allow these entities to focus on what they do best – meeting our communities’ basic needs. As expressed in this blog, Cloudflare provides an innovative and elegant solution to cybersecurity: Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a radical change in the approach to cybersecurity that is both effective and effortless, something that a resource-strapped organization will certainly appreciate.
Earlier this year, in response to the increasing cyber attacks on critical infrastructure stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we provided our Zero Trust solution to critical infrastructure in the United States via the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project. Now, we are expanding our support to the global community, initially focusing our efforts in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
What Zero Trust services are available?
Depending on their specific needs, eligible entities in these regions will have our enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity services for free and with no time limit – there is no catch and no underlying obligations. Eligible organizations will benefit from the full range of our Zero Trust services:
- Connecting users to applications: Real-time verification of every user to every protected application in order to protect internal resources and defend against potential data breaches.
- Filtering traffic: A Secure Web Gateway (SWG) prevents cyber threats and data breaches by filtering unwanted content from web traffic, blocking unauthorized user behavior, and enforcing company security policies.
- Securing cloud applications: A Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, performs several security functions for cloud-hosted services (e.g. SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS applications). Standard CASBs secure confidential data through access control and data loss prevention, reveal shadow IT, and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.
- Protecting sensitive data: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) secures your orgnizations’ most sensitive data in transit.
- Email security: Area 1 preemptively blocks phishing, Business Email Compromise attacks, malware-less fraud, and other incessant attacks coming through email.
- Safer web browsing: Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) insulates users from untrusted web content and protects data in browser interactions from untrusted users and devices.
In addition to Zero Trust services above, eligible entities will have our world-class application security products – DDOS protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Who can apply?
To be eligible, Project Safekeeping participants must be:
- Located in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
- Considered critical infrastructure by governments in their respective localities.
- Approximately up to 50 people and/or less than USD $10million in annual revenue/ balance sheet total.
If you think your organization may be eligible, we welcome you to contact us to learn more and apply, please visit: https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/project-safekeeping/.
