One of the many great features that CloudFlare provides is protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A malicious party who wants to make your website or web service unavailable could try to overwhelm it with requests from compromised machines (or bots) all around the world. With a large
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. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it
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. It's fun, therefore, whenever we have a customer that is willing to let us tell the story of an attack
Good Web Security News: Open DNS Resolvers Are Getting Closed
This has been a rough week in the security industry with big attacks and compromises reported at companies from Facebook to Apple. We're therefore happy to end the week with some good news: the web's open resolvers, one of the sources of the biggest DDoS attacks,
When the Bad Guys Name Malware After You, You Know You're Doing Something Right
CloudFlare's I'm Under Attack Mode (IUAM) is elegantly simple. When a site is under an application layer (Layer 7) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the mode will return a challenge page to a visitor. The challenge requires the visitor's browser to answer a
Hackers love the holidays
This article was written by John Graham-Cumming on the CloudFlare team and originally published by VentureBeat. We're republishing it here. Looking at the latest DDoS attack statistics from CloudFlare's network, it seems that hackers love the holidays. Zooming in on November and December 2012 it'
