Back in April we announced Rate Limiting of requests for every Cloudflare customer. Being able to rate limit at the edge of the network has many advantages: it’s easier for customers to set up and operate, their origin servers are not bothered by excessive traffic or layer 7 attacks,
Reflections on reflection (attacks)
Recently Akamai published an article about CLDAP reflection attacks. This got us thinking. We saw attacks from Connectionless LDAP servers back in November 2016 but totally ignored them because our systems were automatically dropping the attack traffic without any impact. CC BY 2.0 image by RageZ We decided to
Introducing SSL for SaaS
If you’re running a SaaS company, you know how important it is that your application is performant, highly available, and hardened against attack. Your customers—and your revenue stream—depend on it. Putting your app behind a solution such as Cloudflare is an obvious move for your own infrastructure,
Understanding Our Cache and the Web Cache Deception Attack
About a month ago, security researcher Omer Gil published the details of an attack that he calls the Web Cache Deception attack. It works against sites that sit behind a reverse proxy (like Cloudflare) and are misconfigured in a particular way. Unfortunately, the definition of "misconfigured" for the purposes of
Cloudflare Rate Limiting - Insight, Control, and Mitigation against Layer 7 DDoS Attacks
Today, Cloudflare is extending its Rate Limiting service by allowing any of our customers to sign up. Our Enterprise customers have enjoyed the benefits of Cloudflare’s Rate Limiting offering for the past several months. As part of our mission to build a better internet, we believe that everyone should
DDoS Ransom: An Offer You Can Refuse
Cloudflare has covered DDoS ransom groups several times in the past. First, we reported on the copycat group claiming to be the Armada Collective and then not too long afterwards, we covered the "new" Lizard Squad. While in both cases the groups made threats that were ultimately empty, these types
The Porcupine Attack: investigating millions of junk requests
We extensively monitor our network and use multiple systems that give us visibility including external monitoring and internal alerts when things go wrong. One of the most useful systems is Grafana that allows us to quickly create arbitrary dashboards. And a heavy user of Grafana we are: at last count
The Daily DDoS: Ten Days of Massive Attacks
Back in March my colleague Marek wrote about a Winter of Whopping Weekend DDoS Attacks where we were seeing 400Gbps attacks occurring mostly at the weekends. We speculated that attackers were busy with something else during the week. This winter we've seen a new pattern, and attackers aren't taking the