The story of a little DNS easter egg
August 27, 2013
About a year ago, we realized that CloudFlare's current DNS infrastructure had some challenges. We were using PowerDNS, an open source DNS server that is popular with hosting providers. ...
Staying on top of TLS attacks
July 11, 2013
CloudFlare makes extensive use of TLS connections throughout our service which makes staying on top of the latest news about security problems with TLS a priority. We use TLS both externally and internally and different uses of TLS have different constraints....
Happy IPv6 Day: Usage On the Rise, Attacks Too
June 06, 2013
June 6th is known as World IPv6 Day so we thought it was a good time to look at the trends in IPv6 usage across CloudFlare's network. ...
Patching the Internet in Realtime: Fixing the Current WordPress Brute Force Attack
April 11, 2013
There is currently a significant attack being launched at a large number of WordPress blogs across the Internet. The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username "admin" and trying thousands of passwords. ...
How the CloudFlare Team Got Into Bondage (It's Not What You Think)
April 08, 2013
At CloudFlare, we're always looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks. We're only able to deal with the very large amount of traffic that we handle because we've built a network that can efficiently handle an extremely high volume of network requests. ...
MORE POSTS
March 27, 2013
The DDoS that almost broke the Internet
The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet....
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March 20, 2013
The DDoS That Knocked Spamhaus Offline (And How We Mitigated It)
At CloudFlare, we deal with large DDoS attacks every day. Usually, these attacks are directed at large companies or organizations that are reluctant to talk about their details. Sometimes a customer is willing to let us tell their story....
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March 03, 2013
Today's Outage Post Mortem
This morning at 09:47 UTC CloudFlare effectively dropped off the Internet. The outage affected all of CloudFlare's services including DNS and any services that rely on our web proxy....
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December 21, 2012
Hackers love the holidays
Looking at the latest DDoS attack statistics from CloudFlare's network, it seems that hackers love the holidays....
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November 27, 2012
Ceasefires Don't End Cyberwars
There is a significant conflict in the Middle East. As has been widely reported, along with the physical confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinians, there have been widespread cyber attacks....
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October 30, 2012
Deep Inside a DNS Amplification DDoS Attack
A few weeks ago I wrote about DNS Amplification Attacks. These attacks are some of the largest, as measured by the number of Gigabits per second (Gbps), that we see directed toward our network....
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September 17, 2012
How to Launch a 65Gbps DDoS, and How to Stop One
Yesterday I posted a post mortem on an outage we had Saturday. The outage was caused when we applied an overly aggressive rate limit to traffic on our network while battling a determined DDoS attacker. ...
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August 28, 2012
Turning "I'm Under Attack" into "I'm Doing Some Good"
CloudFlare's I'm Under Attack mode allows our customers to, at the click of a button, tell us that they are experiencing an attack and enable automatic protection. It works by slowing down visits to the web site that's under attack and performing extra work to identify malicious ...
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August 16, 2012
Saturday Night Fever: Layer 7 attacks against CloudFlare sites
Recently, I've taken a look at DDoS attacks against CloudFlare sites at the IP level and the source of those attacks. The worst time for those DDoS attacks is the Wednesday Witching Hour and because of source IP address forgery most of the attacks seem to come from Mars. ...
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August 06, 2012
Mars Attacks!
Following on from my recent post about when attacks hit CloudFlare, here's a follow up looking at where they come from. Or at least where they say they come from. Looking at attack statistics for the month of July 2012 the largest source of attacks is Mars....
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August 03, 2012
The Wednesday Witching Hour: CloudFlare DoS Statistics
Data from inside CloudFlare's network shows that over 40% of the time there's a denial of service attack happening and directed at us. And that's just up to network layer 4 (i.e. it doesn't include more sophisticated attacks targeting applications themselves at layer 7)....
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June 04, 2012
The Four Critical Security Flaws that Resulted in Last Friday's Hack
A core value CloudFlare is that security information should be shared between organizations to make the entire Internet safer. That is how CloudFlare's systems work: if one site is attacked, data about that attack is immediately shared with the rest of the network so other sites ...
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June 01, 2012
Post Mortem: Today's Attack; Apparent Google Apps/Gmail Vulnerability; and How to Protect Yourself
This morning a hacker was able to access a customer's account on CloudFlare and change that customer's DNS records. The attack was the result of a compromise of Google's account security procedures....
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December 21, 2011
2011: The Year of the DDoS
As the year comes to a close, we've been assembling trend data for 2011. One of the most interesting has been the rise of denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Controlling for CloudFlare's growth, we've seen a 700% increase in DDoS attacks over the course of the year....
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December 15, 2011
Do Hackers Take the Holidays Off?
I was talking last week with Shawn Graham, a reporter at Fast Company, and he asked a simple but interesting question: do hackers take the holidays off?...
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