But while detections have become more sophisticated, explanations have not always kept pace.

Security and IT teams are often aware when something is flagged, but they do not always know, at a glance, why. End users are asked to make real-time decisions about emails that may impact the entire organization, yet they are rarely given clear, contextual guidance in the moment that matters.

Cloudy changes that.

Cloudy is our LLM-powered explanation layer, built directly into Cloudflare One. It translates complex machine learning outputs into precise, human-readable guidance for security teams and end users alike. Instead of exposing raw technical signals, Cloudy surfaces the reasoning behind a detection in a way that drives informed action.

For Cloudflare Email Security, this means helping users understand why a message was flagged before they escalate it to the security operations center, or SOC. For Cloudflare CASB, it means helping administrators quickly understand the risk and remediation path for SaaS findings without having to manually assess low-level signals.

This post outlines how we are extending Cloudy across Phishnet and API CASB to improve decision making, reduce unnecessary noise, and turn complex security signals into clear, actionable insight.

When an email is analyzed by Cloudflare Email Security, it is not evaluated by a single signal or model. Instead, a wide range of machine learning models analyze different parts of the message, from sender reputation and message structure to content, links, and behavioral patterns. This model set continues to grow as our machine learning team regularly trains and deploys new detections to keep pace with evolving threats.

Based on this analysis, messages are labeled with outcomes such as Malicious, Suspicious, Spam, Bulk, or Spoof. While these detections have been effective, we consistently heard feedback from customers that it was not always clear why a message was flagged. The decision was correct, they told us —  but the reasoning behind it was often opaque to both end users and security teams.

To address this, we introduced the first version of Cloudy: LLM-powered summaries for detections. These summaries translate what our machine learning models are seeing into human readable explanations. Initially, these summaries were available in the Cloudflare dashboard to help SOC teams during investigations. Over the past few months, customer feedback has confirmed that these explanations significantly improve understanding in our detections.

As we continued speaking with customers, another challenge surfaced. Our Phishnet tool allows users to submit messages to the SOC when they believe an email may be suspicious. While this empowers employees to participate in security, many SOC teams told us their queues were being flooded with submissions that turned out to be clean messages.

The result was unnecessary backlog and slower response times for emails that actually required investigation.

At the same time, customers told us that traditional security awareness training was not always enough. Users still struggled to evaluate emails in the moment, when it mattered most. They wanted more contextual guidance directly within the workflow where decisions are made.

This upgrade is designed to address both of these problems. By bringing clearer explanations and contextual education directly into Phishnet, we aim to help users make better decisions while reducing noise for SOC teams, without sacrificing security.

As organizations and attack techniques have evolved, so has the role of the end user. Modern email threats increasingly rely on social engineering, subtle impersonation, and psychological pressure which places users directly in the decision path.

In response, users are being asked to act as an additional layer of defense. However, traditional security awareness tools often fall short. Training is typically delivered through periodic sessions or simulated phishing campaigns, disconnected from real messages and real decisions. When users encounter an unfamiliar email, they are left without enough context to confidently assess risk.

This gap commonly leads to one of two outcomes. Some users submit nearly every questionable message to the SOC, creating excessive noise and slowing down investigations. Others interact with messages they should not, simply because nothing in the moment signals clear risk.

By embedding Cloudy directly into Phishnet, we close this gap. 

Users receive immediate, contextual explanations that help them understand what Cloudflare is seeing and why a message may be risky. This enables users to make informed decisions at the point of interaction, reduces unnecessary escalations to the SOC, and allows security teams to focus on the messages that truly require attention.

Over time, this approach shifts users from being a source of noise to becoming an effective part of the detection and response workflow. The result: stronger email security, without adding friction or burden to security teams.

In the next month, we will be upgrading our Phishnet reporting button to extend the Cloudy summaries.

_{The new Phishnet screens will show Cloudy summaries.}

With this upgrade, end users receive a simplified, user-friendly version of Cloudy summaries at the moment they report a message. These summaries are generated in real time using Cloudflare Workers AI and run directly on Cloudflare’s global Workers platform when a user interacts with a message in Phishnet.

When a user clicks the Phishnet reporting button, the request triggers a Workers-based workflow that aggregates structured outputs from multiple detection models associated with that message. These model outputs include signals such as sender reputation, domain and infrastructure characteristics, authentication results, link and content analysis, and behavioral indicators collected during message processing.

The aggregated signals are then passed to Workers AI, where a series of purpose-built prompts generate a natural language explanation. Each prompt is designed to transform low-level detection outputs into a concise and human-readable summary. This process focuses on explanation rather than classification and does not alter the original disposition of the message.

_{How Cloudy transforms detections into clear explanations.}

For this experience, we intentionally redesigned the summaries compared to those shown to administrators in the Cloudflare dashboard. During testing, we found that admin-focused summaries often relied on technical concepts that were difficult for non-technical users to interpret. Terms such as ASNs, IP reputation, or authentication failures required translation. 

To ensure end users can understand the summaries, Phishnet emphasizes plain-language explanations while preserving the meaning of the underlying detections.

Because this workflow runs on the Cloudflare Workers platform, summaries are generated with low latency and at global scale — so users receive immediate feedback at the moment of interaction. This real-time context allows users to better understand why an email may be risky or why it appears safe before deciding whether to escalate it to the SOC.

We are currently beta testing this experience with Microsoft customers to ensure the summaries are accurate and reliable. Cloudy summaries are not trained on customer data. We are also applying additional validation to ensure the generated explanations do not hallucinate. Accuracy is critical at this stage as incorrect guidance could introduce real security risk.

Following the beta period, we plan to expand access to all Microsoft users. We will also bring similar upgrades to the Phishnet sidebar for Google Workspace users later in 2026.

But helping end users better understand what makes an email risky is only part of the story. We are also applying Cloudy to the administrative side of security operations, where clarity and speed matter just as much. Beyond Phishnet, Cloudy now translates complex CASB findings into structured explanations that help security and IT teams quickly understand risk, prioritize remediation, and take confident action across their SaaS environments.

Inside Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, CASB connects to the SaaS and cloud tools your teams already use. By talking to providers over API, CASB gives security and IT teams:

• A consolidated view of misconfigurations, overshared files, and risky access patterns across apps like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Box, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence (CASB Integrations).

• Continuous scanning for new issues as users collaborate, share, and adopt new tools.

• Findings that are organized, searchable, and exportable for triage and reporting.

_{A typical CASB Findings page showing detections for a Microsoft 365 finding.}

Until now, understanding what exactly triggered a CASB Finding — the detections that CASB makes across connected SaaS integrations — has been a black box. While the information was there to put together an explanation of why that file, that user, that configuration was triggering a CASB Finding Type, it wasn’t exactly obvious the reason why it was ultimately detected by our system.

With the introduction of Cloudy summaries in CASB, users receive a short description of the detection rationale with the specific details of the match listed out for easy comprehension.

Unlike a simple text summary, Cloudy for CASB provides a structured breakdown designed for immediate remediation. As seen in our beta testing across different providers, from Microsoft 365 to Dropbox, the model consistently parses findings into two distinct sections:

• Risk: It identifies exactly why the finding matters. For instance, rather than just noting a 'Suspended User,' Cloudy clarifies that this 'may indicate a compromised account or a user who should no longer have access to company data'.

• Guidance: It offers immediate next steps. Instead of generic advice, it suggests specific actions, such as verifying if a suspension was intentional or reviewing an application's legitimacy before revoking access.

This structure ensures that analysts can understand the gravity of a finding without needing deep expertise in the specific SaaS application involved.

_{An example Cloudy Summary in a CASB Posture Finding.}

We know that when it comes to our customers getting to the bottom of identified security issues, time is of the essence. We believe that any amount of unnecessary uncertainty or lack of clarity around what’s going wrong just puts more time between an imperfect state and one that is more secure.

We built this feature on the same privacy-first foundations as all products at Cloudflare. Cloudy summaries in CASB are generated using Cloudflare Workers AI, ensuring that your data remains within our secure infrastructure during analysis. The models are not trained on your SaaS data, and the summaries are generated ephemerally to aid in triage. This allows your team to leverage the speed of AI without exposing sensitive internal documents or configurations to public models.

For Email Security, we will continue to expand how Cloudy supports both administrators and end users. Our focus is on delivering clearer explanations, better in context guidance, and deeper integration into daily workflows.

For CASB, we’re excited to look for opportunities where Cloudy can make it even easier for CASB administrators to understand what’s going on across their cloud and SaaS apps. Keep an eye out as we look to expand Cloudy coverage to allow administrators to query their findings using natural language, further reducing the time it takes to identify and remediate risks.

Looking ahead, this includes richer explanations for additional detection types, tighter feedback loops between user actions and detections, and continued improvements to how users and SOC teams collaborate through Phishnet. Our goal is to make Cloudy a core part of how organizations understand, trust, and act on email security decisions.

We provide all organizations (whether a Cloudflare customer or not) with free access to our Retro Scan tool, allowing them to use our predictive AI models to scan existing inbox messages in Microsoft 365. 

Retro Scan will detect and highlight any threats found, enabling organizations to remediate them directly in their email accounts. With these insights, organizations can implement further controls, either using Cloudflare Email Security or their preferred solution, to prevent similar threats from reaching their inboxes in the future.

If you are interested in how Cloudflare can help secure your inboxes, sign up for a phishing risk assessment here.

What makes this challenge especially difficult is that our biggest weaknesses are, by definition, invisible.

This problem is best illustrated by a classic example from World War II. Mathematician Abraham Wald was tasked with helping Allied engineers decide where to reinforce bomber aircraft. Engineers initially focused on the bullet holes visible on planes returning from missions. Wald pointed out the flaw: they were reinforcing the areas where planes could already take damage and survive. The true vulnerabilities were on the planes that never came back.

Email security faces an identical hurdle: our detection gaps are unseen. By integrating LLMs, we advance email phishing protection and move from reactive to proactive detection improvement.

The limits of reactive defense

Traditional email security systems improve primarily through user-reported misses. For example, if we marked a spam message as clean, customers can send us the original EML to our pipelines for our analysts to analyze and update our models. This feedback loop is necessary and valuable, but it is inherently reactive. It depends on someone noticing a failure after the fact and taking the time to report it.

That means detection improvements are often driven by what attackers already succeeded at, rather than by what they are about to exploit next.

To close this gap, we need a way to systematically observe the “planes that didn’t make it back.”

Large Language Models (LLMs) hit the mainstream market in late 2022 and early 2023, fundamentally changing how we process unstructured data. At their core, LLMs use deep learning and massive datasets to predict the next token in a sequence, allowing them to understand context and nuance. They are particularly well-suited for email security because they can read natural language and characterize complex concepts (like intent, urgency, and deception) across millions of messages.

Every day, Cloudflare processes millions of unwanted emails. Historically, it was not feasible to deeply characterize each message beyond coarse classifications. Manually mapping emails to nuanced threat vectors simply did not scale. 

Now, Cloudflare has integrated LLMs into our email security tools to identify threats before they strike. By using the power of LLMs, as we’ll describe below, we can finally see a clear and comprehensive picture of the evolving threat landscape.

^{Our LLM-driven categorization shows clear spikes and persistent trends across several distinct categories, including "PrizeNotification" and "SalesOutreach".}

These LLM-generated tags provide Cloudflare analysts with high-fidelity signals in near real time. Tasks that previously required hours of manual investigation and complex querying can now be surfaced automatically, with relevant context attached. This directly increases the velocity at which we can build new targeted Machine Learning models or retrain existing ones to address emerging behaviors.

Because Cloudflare operates at global Internet scale, we can gather these insights earlier than ever before, often before a new technique becomes widely visible through customer-reported misses.

One of the clearest patterns we’ve identified using this new intelligence is the continued persistence of malicious messages structured to look like Sales Outreach-style phishing. These emails are designed to mimic legitimate B2B communication, often presenting opportunities to purchase or receive "special deals" on unique items or services, to lure targets into clicking malicious links or providing credentials.

Once LLM categorization surfaced Sales Outreach as a dominant vector, we moved from broad visibility to targeted data collection. 

Using LLM-generated tags, we began systematically isolating messages that exhibited Sales Outreach characteristics across our global dataset. This produced a continuously growing, high-precision corpus of real-world examples, including confirmed malicious messages as well as borderline cases that traditional systems struggled to classify. From this corpus, we built a dedicated training pipeline.

First, we curated training data by grouping messages based on shared linguistic and structural traits identified by the LLMs. These traits included persuasive framing, manufactured urgency, transactional language, and subtle forms of social proof.

Next, we focused feature extraction on sentiment and intent rather than static indicators. The model learns how requests are phrased, how credibility is established, and how calls to action are embedded within otherwise normal business conversations.

Finally, we trained a purpose-built sentiment analysis model optimized specifically for Sales Outreach behavior. This avoided overloading a general phishing classifier and allowed us to tune precision and recall for this threat class.

The output of this model is a risk score that reflects how closely a message aligns with known Sales Outreach attack patterns. That score is evaluated alongside existing signals such as sender reputation, link behavior, and historical context to determine whether a message should be blocked, quarantined, or allowed.

This process is continuous. As attackers adapt their language, newly observed messages are fed back into the pipeline and used to refine the model without waiting for large volumes of user-reported misses. LLMs act as the discovery layer by surfacing new linguistic variants, while the specialized model performs fast and scalable enforcement.

This is what an all-out offensive looks like in practice. It is a feedback loop where large-scale language understanding drives focused, high-precision detection. The result is earlier intervention against a threat class that thrives on subtlety, and fewer malicious sales emails reaching the inbox.

The visibility unlocked by LLM-driven mapping fundamentally changed how we improve detections. Instead of waiting for attackers to succeed and relying on downstream user reports, we gained the ability to identify systemic gaps earlier and address them at the source. This shift from reactive remediation to proactive reinforcement translated directly into measurable customer impact.

The most immediate signal of success was a marked reduction in customer friction. Sales Outreach–related phishing has historically generated a high volume of user-reported misses, largely because these messages closely resemble legitimate business communication and often evade traditional rule-based or reputation-driven systems. As our targeted models came online and were continuously refined using LLM-derived insights, fewer of these messages reached end users in the first place.

The data reflects this change clearly. Average daily Sales Outreach submissions — messages that we labeled as clean but were in fact Sales Outreach phishing emails, flagged by end users — dropped from 965 in Q3 2025 to 769 in Q4 2025, representing a 20.4% reduction in reported misses in a single quarter.

This reduction is not just a metric improvement; it represents thousands fewer disruptive moments per day for security teams and end users alike. Each avoided submission is a phishing attempt that was stopped before it could erode trust, consume analyst time, or force a user to make a security judgment mid-workflow. We have seen this trend continue in Q1 of 2026 with average daily submissions decreasing by two-thirds.

In effect, LLMs allowed us to “see” the planes that never made it back. By illuminating previously invisible failure modes, we were able to reinforce defenses precisely where attackers were concentrating their efforts. The result is a system that improves not only detection rates, but also the day-to-day experience of the people relying on it.

Our work with LLMs is just beginning. 

To stay ahead of the next evolution of attacks, we are moving toward a model of total environmental awareness by refining LLM specificity to extract forensic-level detail from every interaction. This granular mapping allows us to identify specific tactical signatures rather than relying on broad labels. 

Simultaneously, we are deploying specialized machine learning models purpose-built to hunt for emerging, high-obfuscation vectors at the "fringes" that traditional defenses miss. By leveraging this real-time LLM data as a strategic compass, we can shift our human expertise away from known noise and toward the critical gaps where the next strike is likely to land.

By illuminating the "planes that didn't make it back," we are doing more than just reacting to missed email; we are systematically narrowing the battlefield. In the email arms race, the advantage belongs to the side that can see the invisible first.

We provide all organizations (whether a Cloudflare customer or not) with free access to our Retro Scan tool, allowing them to use our predictive AI models to scan existing inbox messages in Microsoft 365. 

Retro Scan will detect and highlight any threats found, enabling organizations to remediate them directly in their email accounts. With these insights, organizations can implement further controls, either using Cloudflare Email Security or their preferred solution, to prevent similar threats from reaching their inboxes in the future.

If you are interested in how Cloudflare can help secure your inboxes, sign up for a phishing risk assessment here.

The challenge of manual response

Security teams know all too well the grind of manual investigations and remediation. With the mass adoption of AI and increasingly automated attacks, defenders cannot afford to rely on overly manual, low priority, and complex workflows.

Heavily burdensome manual response introduces delays as analysts bounce between consoles and high alert volumes, contributing to alert fatigue. Even worse, it prevents security teams from dedicating time to high-priority threats and strategic, innovative work. To keep pace, SOCs need automated responses that contain and remediate common threats at machine speed before they become business-impacting incidents.

That’s why today, we’re excited to announce a new integration between the Cloudflare One platform and CrowdStrike's Falcon® Fusion SOAR.

As part of our ongoing partnership with CrowdStrike, this integration introduces two out-of-the-box integrations for Zero Trust and Email Security designed for organizations already leveraging CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR or CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM.

This allows SOC teams to gain powerful new capabilities to stop phishing, malware, and suspicious behavior faster, with less manual effort.

Although teams can always create custom automations, we’ve made it simple to get started with two pre-built integrations focused on Zero Trust Access and Email Security. Both follow the same general structure and are available directly in the CrowdStrike Content Library.

Cloudflare within CrowdStrike Content Library

The actions you can take within CrowdStrike from these integrations are the following:

Using these signals, customers can create automated workflows that run with minimal to no human intervention. Falcon Fusion SOAR’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to chain together Cloudflare actions with other signals (from CrowdStrike or even third-party vendors) to automate large portions of the SOC workflow.

An example flow that you could create is: 

1. A phishing email is detected by Cloudflare Email Security.

2. Falcon Fusion SOAR automatically retrieves detection details, blocks the sender, and updates allow/deny lists.

3. Cloudflare Zero Trust revokes active session tokens for the impacted account.

4. If Falcon confirms the endpoint is compromised, the device is automatically isolated.

Another example of how a workflow like above would show in the UI is the following:  

An example automated flow using Cloudflare

From the Cloudflare UI, customers can navigate to the Logpush section where they can set up a job with CrowdStrike. To do this customers need to create a job with “HTTP destination”:

From here, customers can input the HTTP endpoint provided by CrowdStrike in the data connector setup to start sending logs over to Falcon Fusion SOAR. This URL will show up in the following way: ingest.us-2.crowdstrike.com/api/ingest/hec/<CRWDconnectionID>/v1/services/collector/raw

CrowdStrike URL Location

Working Logpush to CrowdStrike

This end-to-end automation allows teams to reduce mean time-to-response from minutes to seconds.

At a technical level, the integration relies on webhook and API integrations between Cloudflare’s SASE platform and CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR. For example:

• From endpoint to network: When the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform detects an endpoint compromise, it triggers a workflow to Cloudflare’s API, which enforces step-up authentication or session revocation across SaaS, private apps, or email access. This is done via Cloudflare’s Access product. 

• From network to endpoint: When Cloudflare flags suspicious behavior (e.g., abnormal login patterns, anomalous traffic, or unsafe email activity), it notifies CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR, which then isolates the device and launches remediation playbooks.

This bidirectional exchange makes sure threats are contained from both sides, endpoint and network, without requiring manual intervention from analysts.

If your organization already uses CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR with Cloudflare’s SASE platform, you can enable these workflows today directly from the Cloudflare Dashboard and CrowdStrike Falcon console (Zero Trust, Email Security). You can also search for Cloudflare within the content library in CrowdStrike to find the integrations. 

For organizations looking to customize further, both platforms allow extensibility through APIs and custom playbooks so SOC teams can tailor response actions to their unique risk posture.

To learn more about our integrations, feel free to reach out to us to get started with a consultation.

According to Forrester:

“Cloudflare is a solid choice for organizations looking to augment current email, messaging, and collaboration security tooling with deep content analysis and processing and malware detection capabilities.”

In this evaluation, Forrester analyzed 10 Email Security vendors across 27 different criteria. Cloudflare received the highest scores possible in nine key evaluation criteria, and also scored among the top three in the current offering category. We believe this recognition is due to our ability to deliver stronger security outcomes across email and collaboration tools. These highlights showcase the strength and maturity of our Email Security solution:

Cloudflare’s advanced sandboxing engine analyzes files, whether directly attached or linked via cloud storage, using both static and dynamic analysis. Our AI-powered detectors evaluate attachment structure and behavior in real time, enabling protection not only against known malware but also emerging threats.

URLs are analyzed at delivery and again at click-time using Cloudflare’s global network. Our OCR and machine learning models extract and analyze metadata and page behavior to determine the maliciousness of a URL. Customers can also isolate suspicious links in remote browser sessions preventing user compromise. We continuously monitor URLs and retroactively remediate messages if the risk changes.

With over 4.4 trillion signals ingested daily across DNS, HTTP, and email layers, Cloudflare operates one of the most comprehensive real-time threat intelligence ecosystems. Campaigns observed via our DNS or HTTP layers are used to preemptively block related email threats well before traditional feeds.

Cloudflare uses an ensemble of large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and machine learning (ML) classifiers to analyze message tone, thread behavior, QR codes, and invoice language. These models detect indicators of fraud, business email compromise (BEC), and social engineering that legacy engines often miss.

Cloudflare’s unified Zero Trust dashboard gives SOC teams full visibility across email, web, cloud, data events. Analysts can pivot across user activity in just a few clicks and export data when needed. 

Our quarantine workflow is designed to minimize disruption. Customers can choose several ways to get notifications to users about messages that have been quarantined. 

Cloudflare enforces SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment automatically. We also offer a free DMARC reporting tool that gives customers visibility into email authentication failures and helps them take control of email brand protection.

Security is core to Cloudflare’s DNA. All services undergo continuous penetration testing, adhere to SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 standards, and operate on Cloudflare’s own infrastructure.

Cloudflare integrates natively with Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto XSOAR, and ServiceNow, making it easy to bring Cloudflare Email Security into existing SOC workflows. We also partner with leading human risk and awareness platforms to give organizations a more user-centric view of risk and behavior.

These strengths reflect Cloudflare’s commitment to building a comprehensive email security platform, one that’s designed to protect email inboxes and workspaces. 

We agree with Forrester’s perspective on where the email security market is headed. Across our customer base, from Fortune 100 enterprises to fast-growing startups, we’ve seen a clear evolution:

Phishing is no longer confined to the inbox.

Attackers are increasingly luring users into external apps, unaudited chat platforms, or legitimate third-party services, bypassing traditional security controls. This shift is forcing SOC teams to think beyond just email and adopt a more holistic approach to workspace security.

Cloudflare was one of the first vendors to position email security as part of a broader SASE and Zero Trust strategy, securing not just messages, but the entire user surface. Looking ahead, we’re doubling down on this integrated vision of workspace security to give SOC teams simpler investigations and faster response.

We will continue to:

• Build AI-driven automation Reduce alert fatigue and manual triage by using LLMs to summarize incidents, auto-label threats, and recommend next steps, allowing junior analysts to act with senior-level confidence.

• Deepen integrations across the Cloudflare ecosystem Continue to unify signals across email, web, cloud, and data to give security teams a single view of user behavior driving faster remediations.

• Enhance real-time user coaching Deliver contextual guidance at the moment of risk, whether via banners, isolation flows, or in-app warnings, to help users make safer and more informed decisions.

• Develop best-in-class detections Continue investing in advanced models detecting new and novel phishing campaigns by leveraging global telemetry from our network edge to stop novel threats faster.

Cloudflare has always approached email security not as a standalone point solution, but as a core pillar of unified threat protection, deeply integrated across the modern enterprise security stack.

We provide all organizations (whether a Cloudflare customer or not) with free access to our Retro Scan tool, allowing them to use our predictive AI models to scan existing inbox messages. Retro Scan will detect and highlight any threats found, enabling organizations to remediate them directly in their email accounts. With these insights, organizations can implement further controls, either using Cloudflare Email Security or their preferred solution, to prevent similar threats from reaching their inboxes in the future.

If you are interested in how Cloudflare can help secure your inboxes, sign up for a phishing risk assessment here. 

_{Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.}

As we continuously work to meet new challenges, Innovation Weeks like Security Week give us an invaluable opportunity to share our point of view and engage with the wider Internet community. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We want to help safeguard the Internet from the arrival of quantum supercomputers, help protect the livelihood of content creators from unauthorized AI scraping, help raise awareness of the latest Internet threats, and help find new ways to help reduce the reuse of compromised passwords. Solving these challenges will take a village. We’re grateful to everyone who has engaged with us on these issues via social media, contributed to our open source repositories, and reached out through our technology partner program to work with us on the issues most important to them. For us, that’s the best part.

Here’s a recap of this week’s announcements:

For a deeper dive on many of the great announcements from Security Week, check out our CFTV segments where our team shares even more details on our latest updates. 

We appreciate everyone who’s taken the time to read Cloudflare’s Security Week blog posts or engage with us on these topics via social media. Our next innovation week, Developer Week, is right around the corner in April. We look forward to seeing you then!

After speaking with our customers, we discovered a common challenge: many wanted to implement a data loss prevention policy for Outlook, but found existing solutions either too complex to set up or too costly to adopt.

That’s why we created DLP Assist to be a lightweight application that can be installed in minutes. Unlike other solutions, it doesn’t require changes to outbound email connectors or provide concerns about IP reputation to customers. By fully leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem, DLP Assist makes email DLP accessible to all organizations, whether they have dedicated IT teams or none at all.

We also recognized that traditional DLP solutions often demand significant financial investment in not just software but also in team members to configure and monitor them. DLP Assist aims to eliminate these barriers. Customers can use the application as part of our Email Security product, avoiding the need for additional purchases. Plus, with our DLP engine powered by optical character recognition (OCR), confidence levels, and other detection mechanisms, organizations don’t need a dedicated team to constantly oversee it. 

By eliminating the complexities of legacy DLP and email systems, we allow customers to quickly begin preventing the unauthorized egress of sensitive data. With DLP Assist, organizations can be confident in controlling and protecting the information that leaves their environment.

Our DLP Assist is an application that integrates with the Desktop (Mac and Windows) and Web Outlook clients, passively scanning emails as they are composed. Running in the background within Microsoft Outlook, DLP Assist continuously monitors new text and attachments added to emails that users are drafting. 

When a customer downloads and installs the application, Cloudflare creates a unique client ID specifically for emails read from the DLP Assist application, which serves as an identifier solely for use by DLP Assist within Cloudflare’s backend. When a user begins drafting a message, the DLP Assist application invokes several Microsoft Outlook APIs to gather information about how the message is changing. These APIs let the Cloudflare application continuously access different parts of the message like subject, body, attachments, etc. While the application is reading the changes within the message, it also establishes a secure, encrypted connection with a Cloudflare Worker. 

As raw data about the email and attachments is sent to the Worker, the Worker relays the information to our DLP engine, which is at the heart of our scanning process. It leverages OCR technology to analyze attachments, extract text from images, and detect DLP violations across both email content and embedded data. It also examines raw text to ensure a comprehensive analysis of every part of the email and its attachments. While our engine supports most attachment types, it currently does not process video or audio files.

The DLP engine runs on all of our servers, and we also store the customer DLP profile configuration data on all of our servers. By keeping DLP policy configuration data on all servers alongside our analysis engine, we eliminate the need to reroute requests across our network allowing for low-latency, real-time DLP checks. The customer's client ID enables us to find and apply their defined DLP profiles and accurately determine policy violations, delivering results directly to the Cloudflare Worker. If a violation is found, the Worker responds to the application to take action within Outlook. 

Our architecture ensures real-time scanning with minimal latency, as end users are always near a Cloudflare Worker, regardless of their location. Additionally, this design provides built-in resilience — if a Cloudflare Worker becomes unavailable, another can take over, allowing for uninterrupted DLP enforcement. By scanning in real time, this allows us to provide immediate feedback to the user about any DLP violations that they have within their email, rather than the user having to wait till the message has been sent. 

If a violation is detected, the application first displays an insight message — a ribbon notification at the top of the email — alerting the user to the issue. Administrators have full control over this message and can customize it to provide specific guidance or warnings. We find that most of our customers point users to documentation reminding them what is allowed to be sent outside of the organization. 

When a DLP violation occurs, DLP Assist also injects a header into the EML file to indicate the violation. If the user removes the content that is in violation, the header is automatically removed as well.

If the violation remains unchanged, DLP Assist invokes a Microsoft Outlook API which prompts the user with a final warning, giving them another opportunity to revise the message before sending.

If the user proceeds without making changes, the email will be sent from the client with headers embedded into the EML showing that message contains a DLP violation. Organizations can configure their outbound mail transfer agent (MTA) to take appropriate action based on these headers. For those with Microsoft as their outbound MTA, Cloudflare’s DLP Assist integrates with Microsoft Purview, enabling organizations to block, encrypt, or require approval before sending.

For example, if an organization configures Purview to block the email, users will receive a notification similar to this one.

Violations detected by the DLP Assist application can also be sent externally through our Logpush feature. Customers have the flexibility to integrate this data with SIEM or SOAR platforms for deeper analysis, or store it in bucket storage solutions like Cloudflare R2. Additionally, customers can enhance their reporting capabilities by viewing block data directly within their outbound gateway.

As we continue to improve our DLP engine, we're introducing more advanced ways to analyze messages. During Security Week 2025, we’re unveiling new AI methodologies that automatically fine-tune DLP confidence levels using machine learning models. Initially, these enhancements will be rolled out for Gateway violations, but we plan to extend them to email scanning in the near future. For more details, see the associated blog post. 

Cloudflare One’s DLP Assist is designed for quick deployment, enabling organizations to implement a data loss prevention solution with minimal effort. It allows customers to immediately begin scanning emails for sensitive data and take action to prevent unauthorized sharing, ensuring compliance and security from day one.

To get started, navigate to the Zero Trust dashboard and click on the Email Security tab. From there, select the Outbound DLP tab.

To install DLP Assist, organizations can download the manifest file, which provides Microsoft with the necessary instructions to install the application within Outlook. Administrators can then upload this manifest file by going to Integrated Apps within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and selecting Upload Custom Apps:

^{This application is best suited for use with OWA (Outlook Web Access) and the desktop (Mac and Windows) Outlook client. Due to Microsoft limitations, a stable experience on mobile devices is not yet available.}

More information can be found within our developer documentation. 

We’re continuously expanding our solutions to help organizations protect their data. Exciting new DLP and Email Security features are on the way throughout 2025, so stay tuned for upcoming announcements.

To learn more about our DLP and Email Security solutions, reach out to your Cloudflare representative. Want to see our detections in action? Run a free Retro Scan to uncover any potentially malicious messages hiding in your inbox.

To support both business continuity and security needs, “security must evolve from being reactive to predictive”. Maintaining a healthy security posture entails monitoring and strengthening your security defenses to identify risks, ensure compliance, and protect against evolving threats. With our newest capabilities, you can now use Cloudflare to achieve a healthy posture across your SaaS and web applications. This addresses any security team’s ultimate (daily) question: How well are our assets and documents protected?

A predictive security posture relies on the following key components:

• Real-time discovery and inventory of all your assets and documents

• Continuous asset-aware threat detection and risk assessment

• Prioritised remediation suggestions to increase your protection

Today, we are sharing how we have built these key components across SaaS and web applications, and how you can use them to manage your business’s security posture.

Regardless of the applications you have connected to Cloudflare’s global network, Cloudflare actively scans for risks and misconfigurations associated with each one of them on a regular cadence. Identified risks and misconfigurations are surfaced in the dashboard under Security Center as insights.

Insights are grouped by their severity, type of risks, and corresponding Cloudflare solution, providing various angles for you to zoom in to what you want to focus on. When applicable, a one-click resolution is provided for selected insight types, such as setting minimum TLS version to 1.2 which is recommended by PCI DSS. This simplicity is highly appreciated by customers that are managing a growing set of assets being deployed across the organization.

To help shorten the time to resolution even further, we have recently added role-based access control (RBAC) to Security Insights in the Cloudflare dashboard. Now for individual security practitioners, they have access to a distilled view of the insights that are relevant for their role. A user with an administrator role (a CSO, for example) has access to, and visibility into, all insights.

In addition to account-wide Security Insights, we also provide posture overviews that are closer to the corresponding security configurations of your SaaS and web applications. Let’s dive into each of them.

Without centralized posture management, SaaS applications can feel like the security wild west. They contain a wealth of sensitive information – files, databases, workspaces, designs, invoices, or anything your company needs to operate, but control is limited to the vendor’s settings, leaving you with less visibility and fewer customization options. Moreover, team members are constantly creating, updating, and deleting content that can cause configuration drift and data exposure, such as sharing files publicly, adding PII to non-compliant databases, or giving access to third party integrations. With Cloudflare, you have visibility across your SaaS application fleet in one dashboard.

From the account-wide Security Insights, you can review insights for potential SaaS security issues:

You can choose to dig further with Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) for a thorough review of the misconfigurations, risks, and failures to meet best practices across your SaaS fleet. You can identify a wealth of security information including, but not limited to:

• Publicly available or externally shared files

• Third-party applications with read or edit access

• Unknown or anonymous user access

• Databases with exposed credentials

• Users without two-factor authentication

• Inactive user accounts

You can also explore the Posture Findings page, which provides easy searching and navigation across documents that are stored within the SaaS applications.

Additionally, you can create policies to prevent configuration drift in your environment. Prevention-based policies help maintain a secure configuration and compliance standards, while reducing alert fatigue for Security Operations teams, and these policies can prevent the inappropriate movement or exfiltration of sensitive data. Unifying controls and visibility across environments makes it easier to lock down regulated data classes, maintain detailed audit trails via logs, and improve your security posture to reduce the risk of breaches.

Delivering SaaS security posture information to our customers requires collecting vast amounts of data from a wide range of platforms. In order to ensure that all the documents living in your SaaS apps (files, designs, etc.) are secure, we need to collect information about their configuration — are they publicly shared, do third-party apps have access, is multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled? 

We previously did this with crawlers, which would pull data from the SaaS APIs. However, we were plagued with rate limits from the SaaS vendors when working with larger datasets. This forced us to work in batches and ramp scanning up and down as the vendors permitted. This led to stale findings and would make remediation cumbersome and unclear – for example, Cloudflare would be reporting that a file is still shared publicly for a short period after the permissions were removed, leading to customer confusion.

To fix this, we upgraded our data collection pipeline to be dynamic and real-time, reacting to changes in your environment as they occur, whether it’s a new security finding, an updated asset, or a critical alert from a vendor. We started with our Microsoft asset discovery and posture findings, providing you real-time insight into your Microsoft Admin Center, OneDrive, Outlook, and SharePoint configurations. We will be rapidly expanding support to additional SaaS vendors going forward.

Cloudflare Workers serve as the entry point for vendor webhooks, handling asset change notifications from external services. The workflow unfolds as follows:

• Webhook listener: An initial Worker acts as the webhook listener, receiving asset change messages from vendors.

• Data storage & queuing: Upon receiving a message, the Worker uploads the raw payload of the change notification to Cloudflare R2 for persistence, and publishes it to a Cloudflare Queue dedicated to raw asset changes.

• Transformation Worker: A second Worker, bound as a consumer to the raw asset change queue, processes the incoming messages. This Worker transforms the raw vendor-specific data into a generic format suitable for CASB. The transformed data is then:

  • Stored in Cloudflare R2 for future reference.

  • Published on another Cloudflare Queue, designated for transformed messages.

Once the transformed messages reach the CASB layer, they undergo further processing:

• Polling consumer: CASB has a consumer that polls the transformed message queue. Upon receiving a message, it determines the relevant handler required for processing.

• Crawler execution: The handler then maps the message to an appropriate crawler, which interacts with the vendor API to fetch the most up-to-date asset details.

• Data storage: The retrieved asset data is stored in the CASB database, ensuring it is accessible for security and compliance checks.

With this improvement, we are now processing 10 to 20 Microsoft updates per second, or 864,000 to 1.72 million updates daily, giving customers incredibly fast visibility into their environment. Look out for expansion to other SaaS vendors in the coming months. 

A unique challenge of securing web applications is that no one size fits all. An asset-aware posture management bridges the gap between a universal security solution and unique business needs, offering tailored recommendations for security teams to protect what matters.

Starting today, all Cloudflare customers have access to Security Overview, a new landing page customized for each of your onboarded domains. This page aggregates and prioritizes security suggestions across all your web applications:

1. Any (ongoing) attacks detected that require immediate attention

2. Disposition (mitigated, served by Cloudflare, served by origin) of all proxied traffic over the last 7 days

3. Summary of currently active security modules that are detecting threats

4. Suggestions of how to improve your security posture with a step-by-step guide

5. And a glimpse of your most active and lately updated security rules

These tailored security suggestions are surfaced based on your traffic profile and business needs, which is made possible by discovering your proxied web assets.

Many web applications, regardless of their industry or use case, require similar functionality: user identification, accepting payment information, etc. By discovering the assets serving this functionality, we can build and run targeted threat detection to protect them in depth.

As an example, bot traffic towards marketing pages versus login pages have different business impacts. Content scraping may be happening targeting your marketing materials, which you may or may not want to allow, while credential stuffing on your login page deserves immediate attention.

Web assets are described by a list of endpoints; and labelling each of them defines their business goals. A simple example can be POST requests to path /portal/login, which likely describes an API for user authentication. While the GET requests to path /portal/login denote the actual login webpage.

To describe business goals of endpoints, labels come into play. POST requests to the /portal/login endpoint serving end users and to the /api/admin/login endpoint used by employees can both can be labelled using the same cf-log-in managed label, letting Cloudflare know that usernames and passwords would be expected to be sent to these endpoints.

API Shield customers can already make use of endpoint labelling. In early Q2 2025, we are adding label discovery and suggestion capabilities, starting with three labels, cf-log-in, cf-sign-up, and cf-rss-feed. All other customers can manually add these labels to the saved endpoints. One example, explained below, is preventing disposable emails from being used during sign-ups. 

Customers told us that, with the growing excitement around generative AI, they need support to secure this new technology while not hindering innovation. Being able to discover LLM-powered services allows fine-tuning security controls that are relevant for this particular technology, such as inspecting prompts, limit prompting rates based on token usage, etc. In a separate Security Week blog post, we will share how we build Cloudflare Firewall for AI, and how you can easily protect your generative AI workloads.

Account fraud detection, which encompasses multiple attack vectors, is another key area that we are focusing on in 2025.

On many login and signup pages, a CAPTCHA solution is commonly used to only allow human beings through, assuming only bots perform undesirable actions. Put aside that most visual CAPTCHA puzzles can be easily solved by AI nowadays, such an approach cannot effectively solve the root cause of most account fraud vectors. For example, human beings using disposable emails to sign up single-use accounts to take advantage of signup promotions.

To solve this fraudulent sign up issue, a security rule currently under development could be deployed as below to block all attempts that use disposable emails as a user identifier, regardless of whether the requester was automated or not. All existing or future cf-log-in and cf-sign-up labelled endpoints are protected by this single rule, as they both require user identification.

Our fast expanding use-case driven threat detections are all running by default, from the first moment you onboarded your traffic to Cloudflare. The instant available detection results can be reviewed through security analytics, helping you make swift informed decisions.

APIs have their own set of risks and vulnerabilities, and today Cloudflare is delivering seven new risk scans through API Posture Management. This new capability of API Shield helps reduce risk by identifying security issues and fixing them early, before APIs are attacked. Because APIs are typically made up of many different backend services, security teams need to pinpoint which backend service is vulnerable so that development teams may remediate the identified issues.

Our new API posture management risk scans do exactly that: users can quickly identify which API endpoints are at risk to a number of vulnerabilities, including sensitive data exposure, authentication status, Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) attacks, and more.

Authentication Posture is one risk scan you’ll see in the new system. We focused on it to start with because sensitive data is at risk when API authentication is assumed to be enforced but is actually broken. Authentication Posture helps customers identify authentication misconfigurations for APIs and alerts of their presence. This is achieved by scanning for successful requests against the API and noting their authentication status. API Shield scans traffic daily and labels API endpoints that have missing and mixed authentication for further review.

For customers that have configured session IDs in API Shield, you can find the new risk scan labels and authentication details per endpoint in API Shield. Security teams can take this detail to their development teams to fix the broken authentication.

We’re launching today with scans for authentication posture, sensitive data, underprotected APIs, BOLA attacks, and anomaly scanning for API performance across errors, latency, and response size.

Achieving a good security posture in a fast-moving environment requires innovative solutions that can transform complexity into simplicity. Bringing together the ability to continuously assess threats and risks across both public and private IT environments through a single platform is our first step in supporting our customers’ efforts to maintain a healthy security posture.

To further enhance the relevance of security insights and suggestions provided and help you better prioritize your actions, we are looking into integrating Cloudflare’s global view of threat landscapes. With this, you gain additional perspectives, such as what the biggest threats to your industry are, and what attackers are targeting at the current moment. Stay tuned for more updates later this year.

If you haven’t done so yet, onboard your SaaS and web applications to Cloudflare today to gain instant insights into how to improve your business’s security posture.

In 2020, in partnership with the non-profit, non-partisan Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC), we launched Cloudflare for Campaigns to offer a free package of cybersecurity tools to political campaigns, especially smaller ones with limited resources. Since then, we have helped over 250 political campaigns and parties across the US, regardless of affiliation.

This is why we are excited to announce that we have extended our Cloudflare for Campaigns product suite to include Email Security, to secure email systems that are essential to safeguarding the integrity and success of a political campaign. By preventing phishing, spoofing, and other email threats, it helps protect candidates, staff, and supporters from cyberattacks that could compromise sensitive data.

Phishing attacks on political campaigns have been a major cybersecurity threat in recent years, often leading to data breaches, leaks, and misinformation. In 2016, attackers targeted Democratic National Committee (DNC) staff with spear phishing emails disguised as Google security alerts, allowing hackers to access thousands of emails. In 2018, Russian intelligence agents attempted to infiltrate Senator Claire McCaskill's re-election campaign by sending emails to her staff, urging them to change their passwords. 

This unsettling trend has affected political parties as well. In 2020, the Republican Party of Wisconsin fell victim to a phishing attack that resulted in hackers stealing $2.3 million. 

During the 2022 US midterm elections, Cloudflare safeguarded the email inboxes of more than 100 campaigns, election officials, and public organizations involved in the election process. These ranged from first-time candidates in local races to seasoned incumbents at the national level. In the three months leading up to the 2022 midterms, Cloudflare processed over 20 million emails and successfully blocked around 150,000 phishing attempts targeting campaign staff. 

During the 2024 US election, we actively protected state and local election offices, political campaigns, state parties, independent media, and voting rights organizations. In addition, we safeguarded the inboxes of hundreds of political campaigns, ensuring secure and uninterrupted communications to help campaigns focus on their message and outreach without the fear of cyberattack derailing their efforts. Over the course of the year, Cloudflare:

• Scanned 5.7 million emails for campaigns and political parties 

• Blocked 400,000 malicious messages before they reached campaign staff and teams

• Detected and blocked 21,000 suspicious emails

• Prevented 14,000 unique spoofing attempts

We launched Cloudflare for Campaigns in 2020 to help political campaigns stay online amid cyber attacks. US campaign finance laws prohibit corporations from donating money or services to federal candidates or parties. However, we partner with Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC), approved by the Federal Election Commission, to offer free and discounted cybersecurity services. Through DDC, we provide tailored security solutions for resource-limited campaigns and parties facing heightened cyber threats.

"DDC is thrilled that Cloudflare is expanding their product offerings to campaigns with the addition of Email Security. This will expedite robust protections from the real and serious threats posed by phishing. Now campaigns, in concert with the DDoS protection Cloudflare provides via Cloudflare for Campaigns, will be able to easily enable a suite of core protections. This new offering further exemplifies Cloudflare's extraordinary and generous commitment to protecting campaigns. Cloudflare has been one of DDC’s core partners since we were founded."  – Michael Kaiser, President & CEO of Defending Digital Campaigns

Over five years, our partnership has strengthened protections against DDoS attacks and web vulnerabilities. However, campaigns have frequently asked for help combating malicious emails that target campaign staff. 

Cloudflare acquired Area 1 Security in 2022 to enhance its Zero Trust platform by integrating an email security solution that proactively identifies and blocks phishing threats before they reach users' inboxes. Before the acquisition, Area 1 provided low-cost email security to political campaigns with direct FEC approval. 

Fast-forward to 2025, and we are excited to officially integrate Email Security into our full Cloudflare for Campaigns portfolio to better protect US political parties and campaigns.

Under this program, Cloudflare Email Security is available starting today and includes: 

• Phishing protection: AI-powered threat detection that automatically identifies and blocks malicious emails before they reach their target

• Email authentication: Built-in support for DMARC, DKIM, and SPF to prevent email spoofing

• Real-time monitoring: Continuous scanning for suspicious activities and anomalies

• Seamless integration: Easily integrates with existing email providers without disrupting workflows

• Insightful reporting: Actionable analytics and reports to track security events and improve defenses

At Cloudflare, we are committed to helping build a better Internet — one where election campaigns can operate securely, free from the threat of cyber attacks. 

Current campaigns and political parties that are protected under Cloudflare for Campaigns will receive an email with information on how to enable Email Security. If you are a campaign or a political party interested in applying for the project to get access to the full suite of products, please visit https://www.cloudflare.com/campaigns/usa.

Phishing remains the most popular attack vector for bad actors looking to gain unauthorized access or extract fraudulent payment, and it is estimated that 90% of all attacks start with a phishing email. However, as companies have shifted to using a multitude of apps to support communication and collaboration, attackers too have evolved their approach. Attackers now engage employees across a combination of channels in an attempt to build trust and pivot targeted users to less-secure apps and devices. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to address this trend thanks to our integrated Zero Trust services, extensive visibility from protecting approximately 20% of all websites, and signals derived from processing billions of email messages a year.

Cloudflare recognizes that combating phishing requires an integrated approach and a more complete view of user-based risk. That’s why we’ve designed our email security solution to protect organizations before, during, and after message delivery, while also extending protection beyond email into the broader security ecosystem. Phishing is no longer just an email problem — it’s a multi-channel, cross-application threat.

When it comes to protecting against user-based threats, Cloudflare employs a platform approach to security. Instead of forcing customers to rely on an array of fragmented tools that create unnecessary complexity and blind spots, we treat email security as part of an overall strategy for assessing and responding to user-related risk. Our email security solution works in tandem with our network solutions so that SOC teams can quickly assert what actions their users are performing outside of email. Given our extensive network visibility, our platform is not limited by API integrations, and can provide SOC teams with the best visibility and protection. This helps SOC teams not only combat phishing, but begin to identify and take action against a wider range of insider threats.

Within a single, unified dashboard, SOC teams can quickly review detailed information regarding the following questions, which we discuss in more detail below: 

1. Who in the organization is being targeted?

2. Who are the attackers impersonating?

3. What risky behaviors are my users performing?

Within the Cloudflare dashboard, SOC teams can view which users are the most targeted. This can help them determine which accounts should be hardened (e.g. MFA enforced), and identify risky users that should be monitored more closely for significant deviations in behavior. One way organizations can use this information is to require high-risk users to connect from a managed device. For instance, if they use Crowdstrike, we can require that these users be on a managed device and force a posture check before letting them access sensitive applications. 

SOC teams can also dive into what types of attacks are hitting their users and at what frequency.

Customers can use these insights to adjust various platform policies, effectively blocking malicious content and securing sensitive resources. Above, we can see that attackers are frequently leveraging links to try to compromise users. Based on the link analysis we are seeing in email, SOC teams can use our gateway to block similar attacks, so that when attackers try to use other communication methods (LinkedIn, Teams, Slack, etc.) users will not be able to interact with those links.

To learn more about stopping these types of multichannel phishing attacks, please see our blog post, A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you.

SOC teams can also get visibility into impersonation attempts within their email environment. Customers can see which users are being impersonated the most, and can use this information to build policies within our email security solution and broader set of Zero Trust services.

A list of frequently impersonated users can be added to the impersonation registry, which changes the sensitivity of our models to apply more scrutiny on messages coming from those users. 

Given our unique position as a domain name registrar, customers can also report lookalike domains to Cloudflare for action to be taken against them. This helps prevent attackers from being able to impersonate our customers and negatively impact their reputation. 

Finally, customers can also use our free DMARC management to track who is sending emails on their behalf. This information can be used to update SPF records and get customers to p=quarantine or p=reject so that their brand is more resistant to being spoofed. 

Cloudflare provides visibility into user actions in several ways. 

Within the email security solution, we can track internal messages and alert if we see any malicious or suspicious behaviors. This can be enhanced with our managed service offering, Phishguard, which can alert admins when they see any type of behavior that indicates fraud (like Business Email Compromise), account takeover, or insider threats.

SOC teams can also take advantage of our CASB solution to view the different actions that users have performed. Actions are labeled with different risk levels to let teams know which findings are critical and require remediation. 

Customers are also able to view data loss prevention (DLP) violations that users have incurred to see if there is any unauthorized egress of data. We provide the ability to automatically block this egress based on different policies within our platform, making sure there is no exfiltration of sensitive data.

We also enable organizations to put internal applications behind our Access solution. This prevents any users with improper permissions or a high risk level from accessing critical applications. Our dashboard then provides metrics on these logins to see how many failures we observed, so that SOC teams can investigate the user further. 

These signals feed into our Unified Risk Score, which can be exported if needed to take automated actions within other platforms.

With all of our functionality unified within a single interface and fed by one data lake, we see an increase in SOC productivity because teams no longer have to spend time building rules or flipping between disparate interfaces and workflows. 

Unlike legacy secure email gateways, our email security solution is driven by predictive AI models which eliminate the need for creating and updating rules. These models are also more effective than reactive measures because they are fed by a massive volume of diverse data from across Cloudflare’s network. This means models are trained on emerging threats earlier and can identify new tactics with a higher accuracy than legacy systems. 

To further reduce the risk posed by users visiting potentially malicious websites, customers can isolate browser sessions using our natively integrated, clientless remote browser that runs on our global network. Within an isolated browsing session, SOC teams can prohibit various behaviors such as copy/paste, upload/download, keyboard inputs, and more. This decreases the risk of users accessing a website and performing an action which could compromise the organization.

Our browser isolation solution also decreases the time SOC teams need to maintain policies. Rather than adding domains and applications one by one, teams can choose to isolate based on content categories. These categories are based on our threat intelligence, and are constantly updated. This means that as new websites emerge, SOC teams do not have to spend the time to chase down and update the proper policy — rather, it is done automatically. 

While some websites might require running in an isolated browser to mitigate the risk of users encountering malicious content, others may need to be fully blocked altogether. Customers can use the same process listed above to block any website that could be risky for users based on tags. However, we allow admins to also provide feedback to users to increase awareness. This can be done via a custom block page that allows SOC teams to communicate with users about their risky behaviors, so that they take actions to curb this behavior in the future and alert their SOC teams to attacks that might be occurring. 

In 2024, our email security team focused on refining the user interface and improving the incident investigation experience. Looking ahead to 2025, we plan to introduce additional capabilities that deepen the integration of our email security solution with our SASE platform, delivering enhanced insight and protection against user-based threats. 

Our Email Link Isolation feature currently applies to links we consider suspicious. However, we intend to allow customers to add customized configurations to meet their internal policies. This enhancement will provide more granular control over which websites users can access from an email message without using an isolated browser. 

We will be releasing an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that will allow customers to use our DLP engine for inspecting outbound email messages. This client-side application enables customers to configure downstream policies that trigger action when a DLP policy is violated, all while minimizing disruption to existing email infrastructure. 

Cloudflare will be increasing the signals that feed into our user risk scores. This will enable SOC teams to create more policies within Cloudflare or to take automated actions externally based on the level of risk observed. 

These are just a few examples of significant releases that will be coming in 2025. Please stay tuned to the Cloudflare blog where we will be announcing these releases as they happen. 

We provide all organizations (whether a Cloudflare customer or not) with free access to our Retro Scan tool, allowing them to use our predictive AI models to scan existing inbox messages. Retro Scan will detect and highlight any threats found, enabling organizations to remediate them directly in their email accounts. With these insights, organizations can implement further controls, either using Cloudflare Email Security or their preferred solution, to prevent similar threats from reaching their inboxes in the future.

In today’s digital landscape, cloud services and SaaS (software as a service) apps have become indispensable for the daily operation of organizations. At the same time, the amount of data flowing between organizations and their cloud providers has ballooned, increasing the chances of data leakage, compliance issues, and worse, opportunities for attackers. Additionally, many companies — especially at enterprise scale — are working directly with multiple cloud providers for flexibility based on the strengths, resiliency against outages or errors, and cost efficiencies of different clouds. 

Security teams that rely on Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) or similar tools for monitoring cloud configurations and permissions and Infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning are falling short due to detecting issues only after misconfigurations occur with an overwhelming volume of alerts. The combination of Kivera and Cloudflare One puts preventive controls directly into the deployment process, or ‘inline’, blocking errors before they happen. This offers a proactive approach essential to protecting cloud infrastructure from evolving cyber threats, maintaining data security, and accelerating compliance. 

In a significant leap forward in cloud security, the combination of Kivera’s technology and Cloudflare One adds preventive, inline controls to enforce secure configurations for cloud resources. By inspecting cloud API traffic, these new capabilities equip organizations with enhanced visibility and granular controls, allowing for a proactive approach in mitigating risks, managing cloud security posture, and embracing a streamlined DevOps process when deploying cloud infrastructure.

Kivera will add the following capabilities to Cloudflare’s SASE platform:

• One-click security: Customers benefit from immediate prevention of the most common cloud breaches caused by misconfigurations, such as accidentally allowing public access or policy inconsistencies.

• Enforced cloud tenant control: Companies can easily draw boundaries around their cloud resources and tenants to ensure that sensitive data stays within their organization. 

• Prevent data exfiltration: Easily set rules to prevent data being sent to unauthorized locations.

• Reduce ‘shadow’ cloud infrastructure: Ensure that every interaction between a customer and their cloud provider is in line with preset standards. 

• Streamline cloud security compliance: Customers can automatically assess and enforce compliance against the most common regulatory frameworks.

• Flexible DevOps model: Enforce bespoke controls independent of public cloud setup and deployment tools, minimizing the layers of lock-in between an organization and a cloud provider.

• Complementing other cloud security tools: Create a first line of defense for cloud deployment errors, reducing the volume of alerts for customers also using CSPM tools or Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs). 

_{An intelligent proxy that uses a policy-based approach to enforce secure configuration of cloud resources.}

As a SASE platform, Cloudflare One ensures safe access and provides data controls for cloud and SaaS apps. This integration broadens the scope of Cloudflare’s SASE platform beyond user-facing applications to incorporate increased cloud security through proactive configuration management of infrastructure services, beyond what CSPM and CASB solutions provide. With the addition of Kivera to Cloudflare One, customers now have a unified platform for all their inline protections, including cloud control, access management, and threat and data protection. All of these features are available with single-pass inspection, which is 50% faster than Secure Web Gateway (SWG) alternatives.  

With the earlier acquisition of BastionZero, a Zero Trust infrastructure access company, Cloudflare One expanded the scope of its VPN replacement solution to cover infrastructure resources as easily as it does apps and networks. Together Kivera and BastionZero enable centralized security management across hybrid IT environments, and provide a modern DevOps-friendly way to help enterprises connect and protect their hybrid infrastructure with Zero Trust best practices.

Beyond its SASE capabilities, Cloudflare One is integral to Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud, enabling organizations to consolidate IT security tools on a single platform. This simplifies secure access to resources, from developer privileged access to technical infrastructure and expanding cloud services. As Forrester echoes, “Cloudflare is a good choice for enterprise prospects seeking a high-performance, low-maintenance, DevOps-oriented solution.”

The cloud has become a prime target for cyberattacks. According to the 2023 Cloud Risk Report, CrowdStrike observed a 95% increase in cloud exploitation from 2021 to 2022, with a staggering 288% jump in cases involving threat actors directly targeting the cloud.

Misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure settings, such as improperly set security parameters and default access controls, provide adversaries with an easy path to infiltrate the cloud. According to the 2023 Thales Global Cloud Security Study, which surveyed nearly 3,000 IT and security professionals from 18 countries, 44% of respondents reported experiencing a data breach, with misconfigurations and human error identified as the leading cause, accounting for 31% of the incidents.

Further, according to Gartner^Ⓡ, “Through 2027, 99% of records compromised in cloud environments will be the result of user misconfigurations and account compromise, not the result of an issue with the cloud provider.”¹

Several factors contribute to the rise of cloud misconfigurations:

• Rapid adoption of cloud services: Leaders are often driven by the scalability, cost-efficiency, and ability to support remote work and real-time collaboration that cloud services offer. These factors enable rapid adoption of cloud services which can lead to unintentional misconfigurations as IT teams struggle to keep up with the pace and complexity of these services. 

• Complexity of cloud environments: Cloud infrastructure can be highly complex with multiple services and configurations to manage. For example, AWS alone offers 373 services with 15,617 actions and 140,000+ parameters, making it challenging for IT teams to manage settings accurately. 

• Decentralized management: In large organizations, cloud infrastructure resources are often managed by multiple teams or departments. Without centralized oversight, inconsistent security policies and configurations can arise, increasing the risk of misconfigurations.

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): CI/CD pipelines promote the ability to rapidly deploy, change and frequently update infrastructure. With this velocity comes the increased risk of misconfigurations when changes are not properly managed and reviewed.

• Insufficient training and awareness: Employees may lack the cross-functional skills needed for cloud security, such as understanding networks, identity, and service configurations. This knowledge gap can lead to mistakes and increases the risk of misconfigurations that compromise security.

Threat actors exploit cloud services through various means, including targeting misconfigurations, abusing privileges, and bypassing encryption. Misconfigurations such as exposed storage buckets or improperly secured APIs offer attackers easy access to sensitive data and resources. Privilege abuse occurs when attackers gain unauthorized access through compromised credentials or poorly managed identity and access management (IAM) policies, allowing them to escalate their access and move laterally within the cloud environment. Additionally, unencrypted data enables attackers to intercept and decrypt data in transit or at rest, further compromising the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information.

Here are some other vulnerabilities that organizations should address: 

• Unrestricted access to cloud tenants: Allowing unrestricted access exposes cloud platforms to data exfiltration by malicious actors. Limiting access to approved tenants with specific IP addresses and service destinations helps prevent unauthorized access.

• Exposed access keys: Exposed access keys can be exploited by unauthorized parties to steal or delete data. Requiring encryption for the access keys and restricting their usage can mitigate this risk.

• Excessive account permissions: Granting excessive privileges to cloud accounts increases the potential impact of security breaches. Limiting permissions to necessary operations helps prevent lateral movement and privilege escalation by threat actors.

• Inadequate network segmentation: Poorly managed network security groups and insufficient segmentation practices can allow attackers to move freely within cloud environments. Drawing boundaries around your cloud resources and tenants ensures that data stays within your organization.

• Improper public access configuration: Incorrectly exposing critical services or storage resources to the internet increases the likelihood of unauthorized access and data compromise. Preventing public access drastically reduces risk.

• Shadow cloud infrastructure: Abandoned or neglected cloud instances are often left vulnerable to exploitation, providing attackers with opportunities to access sensitive data left behind. Preventing untagged or unapproved cloud resources to be created can reduce the risk of exposure.

Many organizations turn to CSPM tools to give them more visibility into cloud misconfigurations. These tools often alert teams after an issue occurs, putting security teams in a reactive mode. Remediation efforts require collaboration between security teams and developers to implement changes, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. This approach not only delays issue resolution but also exposes companies to compliance and legal risks, while failing to train employees on secure cloud practices. On average, it takes 207 days to identify these breaches and an additional 70 days to contain them. 

Addressing the growing threat of cloud misconfigurations requires proactive security measures and continuous monitoring. Organizations must adopt proactive security solutions that not only detect and alert but also prevent misconfigurations from occuring in the first place and enforce best practices. Creating a first line of defense for cloud deployment errors reduces the volume of alerts for customers, especially those also using CSPM tools or CNAPPs. 

By implementing these proactive strategies, organizations can safeguard their cloud environments against the evolving landscape of cyber threats, ensuring robust security and compliance while minimizing risks and operational disruptions.

The Kivera product will not be a point solution add-on. We’re making it a core part of our Cloudflare One offering because integrating features from products like our Secure Web Gateway give customers a comprehensive solution that works better together.

We’re excited to welcome Kivera to the Cloudflare team. Through the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Kivera’s team will focus on integrating their preventive inline cloud app controls directly into Cloudflare One. We are looking for early access testers and teams to provide feedback about what they would like to see. If you’d like early access, please join the waitlist.

_{[1] Source: Outcome-Driven Metrics You Can Use to Evaluate Cloud Security Controls, Gartner, Charlie Winckless, Paul Proctor, Manuel Acosta, 09/28/2023} 

_{GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.}

Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.

You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win. 

Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three main attack vectors that Cloudflare has seen most impactful from the bad emails we protect our customers from: 1. Clicking links (deceptive links are 35.6% of threat indicators) 2. Downloading files or malware  (malicious attachments are 1.9% of threat indicators) 3. Business email compromise (BEC) phishing that elicits money or intellectual property with no links or files (0.5% of threat indicators).

Today, we at Cloudflare see an increase in what we’ve termed multi-channel phishing. What other channels are there to send links, files and elicit BEC actions? There’s SMS (text messaging) and public and private messaging applications, which are increasingly common attack vectors that take advantage of the ability to send links over those channels, and also how people consume information and work. There’s cloud collaboration, where attackers rely on links, files, and BEC phishing on commonly used collaboration tools like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Microsoft Office 365. And finally, there’s web and social phishing targeting people on LinkedIn and X. Ultimately, any attempt to stop phishing needs to be comprehensive enough to detect and protect against these different vectors.

_{Learn more about these technologies and products here}

It’s one thing to tell you this, but we’d love to give you an example of how a multi-channel phish plays out with a sophisticated attacker.

Here’s an email message that an executive notices is in their junk folder. That’s because our Email Security product noticed there’s something off about it and moved it there, but it relates to a project the executive is working on, so the executive thinks it’s legitimate. There’s a request for a company org chart, and the attacker knows that this is the kind of thing that’s going to be caught if they continue on email, so they include a link to a real Google form:

• The executive clicks the link, and because it is a legitimate Google form, it displays the following:

• There’s a request to upload the org chart here, and that’s what they try to do:

• The executive drags it in, but it doesn’t finish uploading because in the document there is an “internal only” watermark that our Gateway and digital loss prevention (DLP) engine detected, which in turn prevented the upload.

• Sophisticated attackers use urgency to drive better outcomes. Here, the attackers know the executive has an upcoming deadline for the consultant to report back to the CEO. Unable to upload the document, they respond back to the attacker. The attacker suggests that they try another method of upload or, in the worst case scenario, send the document on WhatsApp. 

• The executive attempts to upload the org chart to the website they were provided in the second email, not knowing that this site would have loaded malware, but because it was loaded in Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation, it kept the executive’s device safe. Most importantly, when trying to upload sensitive company documents, the action is stopped again:

• Finally they try WhatsApp, and again, we block it:

Setting up a security solution and maintaining it is critical to long term protection. However, having IT administration teams constantly tweak each product, configuration, and monitor each users’ needs is not only costly but risky as well, as it puts a large amount of overhead on these teams. 

Protecting the executive in the example above required just four steps:

1. Install and login to Cloudflare’s device agent for protection

   

   With just a few clicks, anyone with the device agent client can be protected against multi-channel phish, making it easy for end users and administrators. For organizations that don’t allow clients to be installed, an agentless deployment is also available.  

2. Configure policies that apply to all your user traffic routed through our secure web gateway. These policies can block access outright to high risk sites, such as those known to participate in phishing campaigns. For sites that may be suspicious, such as newly registered domains, isolated browser access allows users to access the website, but limits their interaction.

   

   The executive was also unable to upload the org chart to a free cloud storage service because their organization is using Cloudflare One’s Gateway and Browser Isolation solutions that were configured to load any free cloud storage websites in a remote isolated environment, which not only prevented the upload but also removed the ability to copy and paste information as well. Also, while the executive was able to converse with the bad actor over WhatsApp, their files were blocked because of Cloudflare One’s Gateway solution, configured by the administrator to block all uploads and downloads on WhatsApp. 

3. Set up DLP policies based on what shouldn’t be uploaded, typed, or copied and pasted.

   

   The executive was unable to upload the org chart to the Google form because the organization is using Cloudflare One’s Gateway and DLP solutions. This protection is implemented by configuring Gateway to block any DLP infraction, even on a valid website like Google.

4. Deploy Email Security and set up auto-move rules based on the types of emails detected.

   

In the example above, the executive never received any of the multiple malicious emails that were sent to them because Cloudflare’s Email Security was protecting their inbox. The phishing emails that did arrive were put into their Junk folder because the email was impersonating someone that didn’t match the signature in the email, and the configuration in Email Security automatically moved it there because of a one-click configuration set by the executive’s IT administrator.

But even with best-in-class detections, it goes without saying that it is important to have the ability to drill down on any metric to learn about individual users that are being impacted by an ongoing attack. Below is a mockup of our upcoming improved email security monitoring dashboard.

While phishing, despite being around for three decades, continues to be a clear and present danger, effective detections in a seamless and comprehensive solution are really the only way to stay protected these days. 

If you’re simply thinking about purchasing email security by itself, you can see why that just isn’t enough. Multi-layered protection is absolutely necessary to protect modern workforces, because work and data don’t just sit in email. They’re everywhere and on every device. Your phishing protection needs to be as well.

While you can do this by stitching together multiple vendors, it just won’t all work together. And besides the cost, a multi-vendor approach also usually increases overhead for investigation, maintenance, and uniformity for IT teams that are already stretched thin.

Whether or not you are at the start of your journey with Cloudflare, you can see how getting different parts of the Cloudflare One product suite can help holistically with phishing. And if you are already deep in your journey with Cloudflare, and are looking for 99.99% effective email detections trusted by the Fortune 500, global organizations, and even government entities, you can see how our Email Security helps. 

If you’re running Office 365, and you’d like to see what we can catch that your current provider cannot, you can start right now with Retro Scan.

And if you are using our Email Security solution already, you can learn more about our comprehensive protection here.

In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, a subtle yet potent form of phishing has emerged — quishing, short for QR phishing. It has been 30 years since the invention of QR codes, yet quishing still poses a significant risk, especially after the era of COVID, when QR codes became the norm to check statuses, register for events, and even order food.

Since 2020, Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution (previously known as Area 1) has been at the forefront of fighting against quishing attacks, taking a proactive stance in dissecting them to better protect our customers. Let’s delve into the mechanisms behind QR phishing, explore why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers, and review how Cloudflare contributes to the fight against this evolving threat.

The impact of phishing and quishing are quite similar, as both can result in users having their credentials compromised, devices compromised, or even financial loss. They also leverage malicious attachments or websites to provide bad actors the ability to access something they normally wouldn’t be able to. Where they differ is that quishing is typically highly targeted and uses a QR code to further obfuscate itself from detection.

Since phish detection engines require inputs like URLs or attachments inside an email in order to detect, quish succeeds by hampering the detection of these inputs. In Example A below, the phish’s URL was crawled and after two redirects landed on a malicious website that automatically tries to run key logging malware that copies login names and passwords. For Example A, this clearly sets off the detectors, but Example B has no link to crawl and therefore the same detections that worked on Example A are rendered inert.

Strange you say, if my phone can scan that QR code then can’t a detection engine recognize the QR code as well? Simply put, no, because phish detection engines are optimized for catching phish, but to identify and scan QR codes requires a completely different engine – a computer vision engine. This brings us to why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers.

There are three main reasons QR codes are popular in phishing attacks. First, QR codes boast strong error correction capabilities, allowing them to withstand resizing, pixel shifting, variations in lighting, partial cropping, and other distortions. Indeed, computer vision models can scan QR codes, but identifying which section of an email, image, or webpage linked in an email has a QR code is quite difficult for a machine, and even more so if the QR codes have been obfuscated to hide themselves from some computer vision models. For example, by inverting them, blending them with other colors or images, or making them extremely small, computer vision models will have trouble even identifying the presence of QR codes, much less even being able to scan them. Though filters and additional processing can be applied to any image, not knowing what or where to apply makes the deobfuscation of a QR code an extremely expensive computational problem. This not only makes catching all quish hard, but is likely to cause frustration for an end user who won’t get their emails quickly because an image or blob of text looks similar to a QR code, resulting in delivery delays.

Even though computer vision models may have difficulty deobfuscating QR codes, we have discovered from experience that when a human encounters these obfuscated QR codes, with enough time and effort, they are usually able to scan the QR code. By doing everything from increasing the brightness of their screen, to printing out the email, to resizing the codes themselves, they can make a QR code that has been hidden from machines scan successfully.

Don’t believe us? Try it for yourself with the QR codes that have been obfuscated for machines. They all link to https://blog.cloudflare.com/

(Brick wall image by rawpixel.com on Freepik)

If you scanned any of the example QR codes above, you have just proven the next reason bad actors favor quish. The devices used for accessing QR codes are typically personal devices with a limited security posture, making them susceptible to exploitation. While secured corporate devices typically have measures to warn, stop, or sandbox users when they access malicious links, these protections are not available natively on personal devices. This can be especially worrisome, as we have seen a trend towards custom QR codes targeting executives in organizations.

QR codes can also be seamlessly layered in with other obfuscation techniques, such as encrypted attachments, mirrors that mimic well-known websites, validations to prove you are human before malicious content is revealed, and more. This versatility makes them an attractive choice for cybercriminals seeking innovative ways to deceive unsuspecting users by adding QR codes to previously successful phishing vectors that have now been blocked by security products.

Cloudflare has been at the forefront of defending against quishing attacks. We employ a multi-faceted approach, and instead of focusing on archaic, layered email configuration rules, we have trained our machine learning (ML) detection models on almost a decade’s worth of detection data and have a swath of proactive computer vision models to ensure all of our customers start with a turnkey solution.

For quish detections, we break it into two parts: 1) identification and scanning of QR codes 2) analysis of decoded QR codes.

The first part is solved by our own QR code detection heuristics that inform how, when, and where for our computer vision models to execute. We then leverage the newest libraries and tools to help identify, process, and most importantly decode QR codes. While it is relatively easy for a human to identify a QR code, there is almost no limit to how many ways they can be obfuscated to machines. The examples we provided above are just a small sample of what we’ve seen in the wild, and bad actors are constantly discovering new methods to make QR codes hard to quickly find and identify, making it a constant cat and mouse game that requires us to regularly update our tools for the trending obfuscation technique.

The second part, analysis of decoded QR codes, goes through all the same treatment we apply to phish and then some. We have engines that deconstruct complex URLs and drill down to the final URL, from redirect to redirect, whether they are automatic or not. Along the way, we scan for malicious attachments and malicious websites and log findings for future detections to cross-reference. If we encounter any files or content that are encrypted or password protected, we leverage another group of engines that attempt to decrypt and unprotect them, so we can identify if there was any obfuscated malicious content. Most importantly, with all of this information, we continuously update our databases with this new data, including the obfuscation of the QR code, to make better assessments of similar attacks that leverage the methods we have documented.

However, even with a well-trained suite of phish detection tools, quite often the malicious content is at the end of a long chain of redirects that prevent automated web crawlers from identifying anything at all, much less malicious content. In between redirects, there might be a hard block that requires human validation, such as a CAPTCHA, which makes it virtually impossible for an automated process to crawl past, and therefore unable to classify any content at all. Or there might be a conditional block with campaign identification requirements, so if anyone is outside the original target’s region or has a web browser and operating system version that doesn’t meet the campaign requirements, they would simply view a benign website, while the target would be exposed to the malicious content. Over the years, we have built tools to identify and pass these validations, so we can determine malicious content that may be there.

However, even with all the technologies we’ve built over the years, there are cases where we aren’t able to easily get to the final content. In those cases, our link reputation machine learning models, which have been trained on multiple years of scanned links and their metadata, have proven to be quite valuable and are easily applied after QR codes are decoded as well. By correlating things like domain metadata, URL structure, URL query strings, and our own historical data sets, we are able to make inferences to protect our customers. We also take a proactive approach and leverage our ML models to tell us where to hunt for QR codes, even if they aren’t immediately obvious, and by scrutinizing domains, sentiment, context, IP addresses, historical use, and social patterns between senders and recipients, Cloudflare identifies and neutralizes potential threats before they can inflict harm.

With the thousands of QR codes we process daily, we see some interesting trends. Notable companies, including Microsoft and DocuSign, have frequently been the subjects of impersonation for quishing attacks. What makes this more confusing for users, and even more likely to scam them, is that these companies actually use QR codes in their legitimate workflows. This further underscores the urgency for organizations to fortify their defenses against this evolving threat.

Below are three examples of the most interesting quish we have found and compared against the real use cases by the respective companies. The QR codes used in these emails have been masked.

Microsoft uses QR codes as a faster way to complete MFA instead of sending six digit SMS codes to users’ phones that can be delayed and are also considered safer, as SMS MFA can be intercepted through SIM swap attacks. Users would have independently registered their devices and would have previously seen the registration screen on the right, so receiving an email that says they need to re-authenticate doesn’t seem especially odd.

DocuSign uses QR codes to make it easier for users to download their mobile app tosign documents, identity verification via a mobile device to take photos, and supports embedding DocuSign features in third party apps which have their own QR code scanning functionality. The use of QR codes in native DocuSign apps and non-native apps makes it confusing for frequent DocuSign users and not at all peculiar for users that rarely use DocuSign. While the QR code for downloading the DocuSign app is not used in signature requests, to a frequent user, it might just seem like a fast method to open the request in the app they already have downloaded on their mobile device.

Microsoft uses QR codes for Teams to allow users to quickly join a team via a mobile device, and while Teams doesn’t use QR codes for voicemails, it does have a voicemail feature. The email on the left seems like a reminder to check voicemail in Teams and combines the two real use cases on the right.

As we confront the persistent threat of quishing, it's crucial for individuals and organizations to be vigilant.  While no solution can guarantee 100% protection, collective diligence can significantly reduce the risk, and we encourage collaboration in the fight against quishing.

If you are already a Cloud Email Security customer, we remind you to submit instances of quish from within our portal to help stop current threats and enhance the capabilities of future machine learning models, leading to more proactive defense strategies. If you aren’t a customer, you can still submit original quish samples as an attachment in EML format to quish@cloudflare.com, and remember to leverage your email security provider’s submission process to inform them of these quishing vectors as well.

The battle against quishing is ongoing, requiring continuous innovation and collaboration. To support submissions of quish, we are developing new methods for customers to provide targeted feedback to our models and also adding additional transparency to our metrics to facilitate tracking a variety of vectors, including quish.

The next 12 months have the potential to reshape the global political landscape with elections occurring in more than 80 nations, in 2024, while new technologies, such as AI, capture our imagination and pose new security challenges.

Against this backdrop, the role of CISOs has never been more important. Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare’s Chief Security Officer, shared his views on what the biggest challenges currently facing the security industry are in the Security Week opening blog.

Over the past week, we announced a number of new products and features that align with what we believe are the most crucial challenges for CISOs around the globe. We released features that span Cloudflare’s product portfolio, ranging from application security to securing employees and cloud infrastructure. We have also published a few stories on how we take a Customer Zero approach to using Cloudflare services to manage security at Cloudflare.

We hope you find these stories interesting and are excited by the new Cloudflare products. In case you missed any of these announcements, here is a recap of Security Week:

Thanks for joining us this week, and stay tuned for our next Innovation Week in early April, focused on the developer community.

During 2021's Birthday Week, we announced our Email Routing service, which allows users to direct different types of email messages (such as marketing, transactional, or administrative) to separate accounts based on criteria such as the recipient’s address or department. Its capabilities and the volume of messages routed have grown significantly since launch.

Just a few months later, on February 23, 2022, we announced our intent to acquire Area 1 Security to protect users from phishing attacks in email, web, and network environments. Since the completion of the acquisition on April 1, 2022, Area 1's email security capabilities have been integrated into Cloudflare's secure access service edge (SASE) solution portfolio, and now processes tens of millions of messages daily.

Processing millions of email messages each day on behalf of our customers gives us a unique perspective on the threats posed by malicious emails, spam volume, the adoption of email authentication methods like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, and the use of IPv4/IPv6 and TLS by email servers. Today, we are launching a new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar to share these perspectives with you. The insights in this new section can help you better understand the state of email security as viewed across various metrics, as well as understanding real-time trends in email-borne threats. (For instance, correlating an observed increase within your organization in messages containing malicious links with a similar increase observed by Cloudflare.) Below, we review the new metrics that are now available on Radar.

As Cloudflare’s email security service processes email messages on behalf of customers, we are able to identify and classify offending messages as malicious. As examples, malicious emails may attempt to trick recipients into sharing personal information like login details, or the messages could attempt to spread malware through embedded images, links, or attachments. The new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar now provides insight at a global level into the aggregate share of processed messages that we have classified as malicious over the selected timeframe. During February 2024, as shown in the figure below, we found that an average of 2.1% of messages were classified as being malicious. Spikes in malicious email volume were seen on February 10 and 11, accounting for as much as 29% of messages. These spikes occurred just ahead of the Super Bowl, in line with previous observations of increases in malicious email volume in the week ahead of the game. Other notable (but lower) spikes were seen on February 13, 15, 17, 24, and 25. The summary and time series data for malicious email share are available through the Radar API.

The Cloudflare Radar 2023 Year in Review highlighted some of the techniques used by attackers when carrying out attacks using malicious email messages. As noted above, these can include links or attachments leading to malware, as well as approaches like identity deception, where the message appears to be coming from a trusted contact, and brand impersonation, where the message appears to be coming from a trusted brand. In analyzing malicious email messages, Cloudflare’s email security service categorizes the threats that it finds these messages contain. (Note that a single message can contain multiple types of threats — the sender could be impersonating a trusted contact while the body of the email contains a link leading to a fake login page.)

Based on these assessments, Cloudflare Radar now provides insights into trends observed across several different groups of threat types including “Attachment”, “Link”, “Impersonation”, and “Other”. “Attachment” groups individual threat types where the attacker has attached a file to the email message, “Link” groups individual threat types where the attacker is trying to get the user to click on something, and “Impersonation” groups individual threat types where the attacker is impersonating a trusted brand or contact. The “Other” grouping includes other threat types not covered by the previous three.

During February 2024 for the “Link” grouping, as the figure below illustrates, link-based threats were unsurprisingly the most common, and were found in 58% of malicious emails. Since the display text for a link (i.e., hypertext) in HTML can be arbitrarily set, attackers can make a URL appear as if it links to a benign site when, in fact, it is actually malicious. Nearly a third of malicious emails linked to something designed to harvest user credentials. The summary and time series data for these threat categories are available through the Radar API.

For the “Attachment” grouping, during February 2024, nearly 13% of messages were found to have a malicious attachment that when opened or executed in the context of an attack, includes a call-to-action (e.g. lures target to click a link) or performs a series of actions set by an attacker. The share spiked several times throughout the month, reaching as high as 70%. The attachments in nearly 6% of messages attempted to download additional software (presumably malware) once opened.

If an email message appears to be coming from a trusted brand, users may be more likely to open it and take action, like checking the shipping status of a package or reviewing a financial transaction. During February 2024, on average, over a quarter of malicious emails were sent by attackers attempting to impersonate well-known brands. Similar to other threat categories, this one also saw a number of significant spikes, reaching as high as 88% of February 17. Just over 18% of messages were found to be trying to extort users in some fashion. It appears that such campaigns were very active in the week ahead of Valentine's Day (February 14), although the peak was seen on February 15, at over 95% of messages.

Identity deception occurs when an attacker or someone with malicious intent sends an email claiming to be someone else, whether through use of a similar-looking domain or display name manipulation. This was the top threat category for the “Other” grouping, seen in over 36% of malicious emails during February 2024. The figure below shows three apparent “waves” of the use of this technique — the first began at the start of the month, the second around February 9, and the third around February 20. Over 11% of messages were categorized as malicious because of the reputation of the network (autonomous system) that they were sent from; some network providers are well-known sources of malicious and unwanted email.

Top-level domains, also known as TLDs, are found in the right-most portion of a hostname. For example, radar.cloudflare.com is in the .com generic Top Level Domain (gTLD), while bbc.co.uk is in the .uk country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). As of February 2024, there are nearly 1600 Top Level Domains listed in the IANA Root Zone Database. Over the last 15 years or so, several reports have been published that look at the “most dangerous TLDs” — that is, which TLDs are most favored by threat actors. The “top” TLDs in these reports are often a mix of ccTLDs from smaller counties and newer gTLDs. On Radar, we are now sharing our own perspective on these dangerous TLDs, highlighting those where we have observed the largest shares of malicious and spam emails. The analysis is based on the sending domain’s TLD, found in the From: header of an email message. For example, if a message came from joe@example.com, then example.com is the sending domain, and .com is the associated TLD.

On Radar, users can view shares of spam and malicious email, and can also filter by timeframe and “type” of TLD, with options to view all (the complete list), ccTLDs (country codes), or “classic” TLDs (the original set of gTLDs specified in RFC 1591). Note that spam percentages shown here may be lower than those published in other industry analyses. Cloudflare cloud email security customers may be performing initial spam filtering before messages arrive at Cloudflare for processing, resulting in a lower percentage of messages characterized as spam by Cloudflare.

Looking back across February 2024, we found that new gTLD associates and the ccTLD zw (Zimbabwe) were the TLDs with domains originating the largest shares of malicious email, at over 85% each. New TLDs academy, directory, and bar had the largest shares of spam in email sent by associated domains, at upwards of 95%.

TLDs with the highest percentage of malicious email in February 2024

TLDs with the highest percentage of spam email in February 2024

The figure below breaks out ccTLDs, where we found that at least half of the messages coming from domains in zw (Zimbabwe, at 85%) and bd (Bangladesh, at 50%) were classified as malicious. While the share of malicious email vastly outweighed the share of spam seen from zw domains, it was much more balanced in bd and pw (Palau). A total of 80 ccTLDs saw fewer than 1% of messages classified as malicious in February 2024.

ccTLDs with the highest percentage of malicious email in February 2024

Among the “classic” TLDs, we can see that the shares of both malicious emails and spam are relatively low. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the largest TLD, com has the largest shares of both in February 2024. Given the restrictions around registering int and gov domains, it is interesting to see that even 2% of the messages from associated domains are classified as malicious.

Classic TLDs with the highest percentage of malicious email in February 2024.

The reasons that some TLDs are responsible for a greater share of malicious and/or spam email vary — some may have loose or non-existent registration requirements, some may be more friendly to so-called “domain tasting”, and some may have particularly low domain registration fees.The malicious and spam summary shares per TLD are available through the Radar API.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three email authentication methods and when used together, they help prevent spammers, phishers, and other unauthorized parties from sending emails on behalf of a domain they do not own.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a way for a domain to list all the servers they send emails from, with SPF records in the DNS listing the IP addresses of all the servers that are allowed to send emails from the domain. Mail servers that receive an email message can check it against the SPF record before passing it on to the recipient's inbox. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) enables domain owners to automatically "sign" emails from their domain with a digital “signature” that uses cryptography to mathematically verify that the email came from the domain. Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) tells a receiving email server what to do, given the results after checking SPF and DKIM. A domain's DMARC policy, stored in DMARC records, can be set in a variety of ways, instructing mail servers to quarantine emails that fail SPF or DKIM (or both), to reject such emails, or to deliver them.

These authentication methods have recently taken on increased importance, as both Google and Yahoo! have announced that during the first quarter of 2024, as part of a more aggressive effort to reduce spam, they will require bulk senders to follow best practices that include implementing stronger email authentication using standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. When a given email message is evaluated against these three methods, the potential outcomes are PASS, FAIL, and NONE. The first two are self-explanatory, while NONE means that there was no associated SPF/DKIM/DMARC policy associated with the message’s sending domain.

Reviewing the average shares across February 2024, we find that over 93% of messages passed SPF authentication, while just 2.7% failed. When considering this metric, FAIL is the outcome of greater interest because SPF is easier to spoof than DKIM, and also because failure may be driven by “shadow IT” situations, such as when a company’s Marketing department uses a third party to send email on behalf of the company, but fails to add that third party to the associated SPF records. An average of 88.5% of messages passed DKIM evaluation in February, while just 2.1% failed. For DKIM, the focus should be on PASS, as there are potential non-malicious reasons that a given signature may fail to verify. For DMARC, 86.5% of messages passed authentication, while 4.2% failed, and the combination of PASS and FAIL is the focus, as the presence of an associated policy is of greatest interest for this metric, and whether the message passed or failed less so. For all three methods in this section, NONE indicates the lack of an associated policy. SPF (summary, time series), DKIM (summary, time series), and DMARC (summary, time series) data is available through the Radar API.

Cloudflare has long evangelized IPv6 adoption, although it has largely been focused on making Web resources available via this not-so-new version of the protocol. However, it’s also important that other Internet services begin to support and use IPv6, and this is an area where our recent research shows that providers may be lacking.

Through analysis of inbound connections from senders’ mail servers to Cloudflare’s email servers, we can gain insight into the distribution of these connections across IPv4 and IPv6. Looking at this distribution for February 2024, we find that 95% of connections were made over IPv4, while only 5% used IPv6. This distribution is in sharp contrast to the share of IPv6 requests for IPv6-capable (dual stacked) Web content, which was 37% for the same time period. The summary and time series data for IPv4/v6 distribution are available through the Radar API.

Cloudflare has also been a long-time advocate for secure connections, launching Universal SSL during 2014’s Birthday Week, to enable secure connections between end users and Cloudflare for all of our customers’ sites (which numbered ~2 million at the time). Over the last 10 years, SSL has completed its evolution to TLS, and although many think of TLS as only being relevant for Web content, possibly due to years of being told to look for the 🔒 padlock in our browser’s address bar, TLS is also used to encrypt client/server connections across other protocols including SMTP (email), FTP (file transfer), and XMPP (messaging).

Similar to the IPv4/v6 analysis discussed above, we can also calculate the share of inbound connections to Cloudflare’s email servers that are using TLS. Messages are encrypted in transit when the connection is made over TLS, while messages sent over unencrypted connections can potentially be read or modified in transit. Fortunately, the vast majority of messages received by Cloudflare’s email servers are made over encrypted connections, with just 6% sent unencrypted during February 2024. The summary and time series data for TLS usage are available through the Radar API.

Although younger Internet users may eschew email in favor of communicating through a variety of messaging apps, email remains an absolutely essential Internet service, relied on by individuals, enterprises, online and offline retailers, governments, and more. However, because email is so ubiquitous, important, and inexpensive, it has also become an attractive threat vector. Cloudflare’s email routing and security services help customers manage and secure their email, and Cloudflare Radar’s new Email Security section can help security researchers, email administrators, and other interested parties understand the latest trends around threats found in malicious email, sources of spam and malicious email, and the adoption of technologies designed to prevent abuse of email.

If you have any questions about this new section, you can contact the Cloudflare Radar team at radar@cloudflare.com or on social media at @CloudflareRadar (X/Twitter), https://noc.social/@cloudflareradar (Mastodon), and radar.cloudflare.com (Bluesky).

Tune in for more news, announcements and thought-provoking discussions! Don't miss the full Security Week hub page.

We are excited to announce an extended partnership between CrowdStrike and Cloudflare to bring together Cloudflare Email Security and CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale. With this integration, joint customers who have both Falcon LogScale and Cloudflare Email Security can now send detection data to be ingested and displayed within their Falcon LogScale dashboard.

CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale enables organizations to ingest, aggregate and analyze massive volumes of streaming log data from a wide array of sources at petabyte scale. It offers search and visualization capabilities, enabling users to easily query and explore their log data to gain valuable insights and identify security threats or anomalies.

Falcon LogScale helps customers by providing:

Log Ingestion It supports the collection of logs from diverse sources and can handle high volumes of log data in real time.

Real-Time Search Users can perform fast searches across their log data, enabling quick detection and investigation of security incidents or operational issues.

Dashboards and Visualizations Falcon LogScale offers customizable dashboards and visualizations to help teams gain insights from their log data.

All of these capabilities enable proactive threat hunting by leveraging advanced analytics. It helps security teams identify potential threats, detect anomalies, and quickly remediate security incidents. Falcon LogScale is designed to handle large-scale log data ingestion and analysis. It can scale to accommodate growing log volumes and provide consistent performance.

Falcon LogScale is the solution for organizations that are looking to consolidate their log management and analysis efforts. It makes monitoring and securing their environments effective and efficient.

Customers who have both Cloudflare Email Security and CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale can now send detection data to Falcon LogScale. Within Falcon LogScale, this detection information can be visualized and queried.

To set up Cloudflare Email Security detections to flow into Falcon LogScale, navigate to the Settings section and choose the Marketplace tab in the lefthand toolbar, as shown in the screenshot below.

After installing the package, an ingest token needs to be generated. Navigate to the “Ingest Tokens” tab under Settings and create one.

Copy the ingest token to save it for later. From here, customers can navigate to the Cloudflare Email Security dashboard, go to the Settings section, select the Alert Webhooks tab and choose “+ New Webhook”. Then click the SIEM option, choose Other from the dropdown, and input the following information:

Auth Token: Bearer [INGEST TOKEN]Target: https://cloud.community.humio.com/api/v1/ingest/hec/raw

Customers can choose which events to send to Falcon LogScale by selecting the expanded option. In the screenshot above, the user has chosen to only send malicious and suspicious detections.

A few minutes after creating a new webhook, Cloudflare Email Security will start sending detection data to the Falcon LogScale instance.

When the Cloudflare Email Security package from the Falcon LogScale marketplace is installed, customers are provided with a parser for field extraction and out-of-box content through a dashboard. The parser allows the Falcon LogScale product to be able to query the detection data while the dashboard allows organizations to quickly get the relevant information about their email security. Below is what the dashboard looks like:

As you can see, we have included visualizations and queries to get teams up and running quickly, but it is meant to be a starting point for customers to build on. Customers can write their own queries and use them to create their own widgets. From there, they can create their own rendition of this dashboard to fit their needs.

More information about setting up this integration can be found here: https://library.humio.com/integrations/integrations-cloudflare-package-area1.html

We are currently looking to expand the integration of Cloudflare products with Falcon LogScale. Our plan is to extend the integration to the remaining components of the Zero Trust Suite, enabling the relaying of logs and detection data to Falcon LogScale. This will allow customers to visualize and analyze data from these products, similar to the existing Cloudflare Email Security integration. If you are interested and would like to learn more, please reach out to your Cloudflare account contact.

After shutting down a ‘phishing-as-a-service’ operation that impacted thousands of victims in 43 countries, INTERPOL recently noted, “Cyberattacks such as phishing may be borderless and virtual in nature, but their impact on victims is real and devastating.” Business email compromise (BEC), a type of malware-less attack that tricks recipients into transferring funds — for example — has cost victims worldwide more than $50 billion, according to the FBI.

It is estimated that 90% of successful cyber attacks start with email phishing, which continues to be very lucrative for attackers. There is not much today that can be done to stop phishing attempts. However, to prevent successful attacks, it is important to understand (and proactively address) evolving phishing trends — including the ways attackers cleverly exploit intended victims’ trust in “known” email senders. To that end, this week Cloudflare published its first Phishing Threats Report.

This report explores key phishing trends and related recommendations, based on email security data from May 2022 to May 2023. During that time, Cloudflare processed approximately 13 billion emails, which included blocking approximately 250 million malicious messages from reaching customers’ inboxes. The report is also informed by a Cloudflare-commissioned survey of 316 security decision-makers across North America, EMEA, and APAC (you can download that separate study here).

Check out the full report to understand our three key takeaways:

• Attackers using deceptive links as the #1 phishing tactic — and how they are evolving how they get you to click and when they weaponize the link;

• Identity deception takes multiple forms (including business email compromise (BEC) and brand impersonation), and can easily bypass email authentication standards;

• Attackers pretend to be hundreds of different organizations, but they primarily impersonate the entities we trust and need to get work done.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind as you read the 2023 Phishing Threats report.

Attackers typically use a combination of social engineering and technical obfuscation techniques to make their messages seem legitimate. Therefore, Cloudflare uses a number of advanced detection techniques to analyze “fuzzy” signals (not just content that’s visible to the naked eye) to identify unwanted emails. Those signals include:

• Structural analysis of headers, body copy, images, links, attachments, payloads, and more, using heuristics and machine learning models specifically designed for phishing signals;

• Sentiment analysis to detect changes in patterns and behaviors (e.g., writing patterns and expressions);

• Trust graphs that evaluate partner social graphs, email sending history, and potential partner impersonations

Our email security service also incorporates threat intelligence from Cloudflare’s global network, which blocks an average of 140 billion cyber threats each day.

Those and many other signals lead to email dispositions of malicious, BEC, spoof, or spam; our dashboard tells customers the specific reasons (i.e., the threat indicator ‘categories’) for a particular email disposition.

Below is a snapshot of the top email threat indicators we observed between May 2, 2022, to May 2, 2023. We categorize threat indicators into more than 30 different categories; over that period, the top threat indicators included deceptive links, domain age (newly registered domains), identity deception, credential harvesting, and brand impersonation.

Below are brief descriptions of each of the top categories (detailed in more depth in the report’s appendix).

If clicked, a deceptive link will open the user’s default web browser and render the data referenced in the link, or open an application directly (e.g. a PDF). Since the display text for a link (i.e., hypertext) in HTML can be arbitrarily set, attackers can make a URL appear as if it links to a benign site when, in fact, it is actually malicious.

Domain age is related to domain reputation, which is the overall score assigned to a domain.  For example, domains that send out numerous new emails immediately after domain registration will tend to have a poorer reputation, and thus a lower score.

Identity deception occurs when an attacker or someone with malicious intent sends an email claiming to be someone else. The mechanisms and tactics of this vary widely. Some tactics include registering domains that look similar (aka domain impersonation), are spoofed, or use display name tricks to appear to be sourced from a trusted domain. Other variations include sending email using domain fronting and high-reputation web services platforms.

Credential harvesters are set up by an attacker to deceive users into providing their login credentials. Unwitting users may enter their credentials, ultimately providing attackers with access to their accounts.

Brand impersonation is a form of identity deception where an attacker sends a phishing message that impersonates a recognizable company or brand. Brand impersonation is conducted using a wide range of techniques.

An attachment to an email that, when opened or executed in the context of an attack, includes a call-to-action (e.g. lures target to click a link) or performs a series of actions set by an attacker.

Cloudflare regularly observes multiple threat indicators in one phishing email. For example, one Silicon Valley Bank-themed phishing campaign (detailed in this March 2023 blog) combined brand impersonation with a deceptive link and malicious attachment.

The attackers leveraged the SVB brand in a DocuSign-themed template. The email included HTML code that contains an initial link and a complex redirect chain that is four deep. The included HTML file in the attack would have sent the recipient to a WordPress instance that has recursive redirection capability.

(Speaking of links, deceptive links were the #1 threat category, appearing in 35.6% of our detections. And attackers aren’t just using links in email channels; the rise of multi-channel phishing threats — which exploit other applications such as SMS/text, chat, and social media — are also covered in the report).

Silicon Valley Bank was just one of approximately 1,000 different brands we observed being impersonated in emails targeting Cloudflare customers between May 2022 and May 2023. (Cloudflare employees were directly targeted via brand impersonation in the “Oktapus” phishing attack that the Cloudflare One suite of products thwarted in July 2022).

However, as detailed in the Phishing Threats Report, we observed that email attackers most often (51.7% of the time) impersonated one of 20 well-known global brands, with Microsoft being #1 on their list.

Earlier this year, Cloudflare detected and blocked a phishing campaign leveraging the Microsoft brand in an attempt to harvest credentials through a legitimate — but compromised — site.

In the email example below, there is no text in the body of the email despite its appearance. The entire body is a hyperlinked JPEG image. Thus, if the recipient clicks anywhere in the body (even if they don’t intend to click the link), they are effectively clicking the link.

Initially, the hyperlink for this image appears to be a benign Baidu URL - hxxp://www.baidu[.]com/link?url=-yee3T9X9U41UHUa3VV6lx1j5eX2EoI6XpZqfDgDcf-2NYQ8RVpOn5OYkDTuk8Wg#<recipient’s email address base64 encoded>.  However, if this link is clicked, the target’s browser would be redirected to a site that had been compromised and used to host a credential harvester.

The attacker used Microsoft Office 365 branding, but attempted to circumvent any brand detection techniques by including the brand information within the image (i.e., there was no plaintext or HTML text that could be inspected to identify the brand).

However, using optical character recognition (OCR), Cloudflare successfully identified “Office 365” and “Microsoft” in the image. Using OCR, we also identified the use of suspicious account lures related to passwords.

In this example, attackers’ techniques included:

• Inclusion of only a JPEG image (impossible to detect words without OCR)

• Embedding a hyperlink in that image (clicking anywhere in the body would result in clicking the link)

• Hyperlinking to a Baidu URL (used to bypass reputation-based URL detection techniques)

• The Baidu URL redirecting the recipient’s browser to a credential harvesting site (i.e., would circumvent other email security defenses that are not capable of deep link inspection)

• Hosting the credential harvester on a legitimate site that had been compromised by the attacker (even with deep link inspection, will again attempt to bypass URL detection techniques based on reputation)

This attack vector leverages the high reputation and authenticity of Baidu to bypass the reputation of the true host/IP where the credential harvester is hosted.

While this specific campaign focused on harvesting Microsoft credentials, we often see attackers using similar methods to bypass brand detection techniques and trick victims into downloading malware and other malicious payloads.

URL redirection techniques are often seen in phishing campaigns, but threat actors are continuing to refine their approach by abusing more and more legitimate domains like baidu.com, bing.com, goo.gl, etc. Our numerous detection capabilities allow us to conduct deep link inspection of URLs using redirection techniques of all kinds, including those that abuse legitimate domains.

Email authentication (specifically the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards) are often mentioned as useful against brand impersonation: these standards help validate server and tenant origins, protect message integrity, provide policy enforcement, and more.

However, attackers can still find ways to bypass authentication to trick email suites; and we actually observed that 89% of unwanted messages “passed” SPF, DKIM, and/or DMARC checks.

Some limitations of email authentication include:

Attackers are constantly evolving their tactics. Multiple protection layers must be enacted before, during, and after messages reach the inbox. Cloudflare never inherently “trusts” any type of email communication (whether it appears to be internal, external, or from a ‘known’ business partner).

Likewise, we recommend that — first and foremost — all organizations extend the Zero Trust security model of “never trust, always verify” not just to the network and applications, but also to the email inbox.

In addition to securing email with a Zero Trust approach, we also recommend:

• Augmenting cloud email with multiple anti-phishing controls. As noted in this Forrester blog from June, “The use of messaging, collaboration, file sharing, and enterprise software-as-a-service applications across multiple devices all contribute to employee productivity and experience. Many of these environments are considered ‘closed,’ but one successful phish of a supply chain partner’s credentials opens your organization up to data loss, credential theft, fraud, and ransomware attacks. Protections developed for the email inbox must extend to these environments and throughout the day-to-day workflows of your employees.”

• Adopting phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA). While not all MFA provides the same layer of security, hardware security keys are among the most secure authentication methods for preventing successful phishing attacks. They can protect networks even if attackers gain access to usernames and passwords.

• Make it harder for humans to make mistakes.  Meet employees and teams where they are by making the tools they already use more secure, and preventing them from making mistakes. For example, remote browser isolation (RBI) technology, when integrated with cloud email security, can automatically isolate suspicious email links to prevent users from being exposed to potentially malicious web content. Keyboard inputs can also be disabled on untrusted websites, protecting users from accidentally entering sensitive information within a form fill or credential harvesting. This provides a layer of defense against multi-channel phishing attacks by effectively allowing users to safely open links without disrupting their workflow.

If you’re interested in the full findings, you can download the 2023 Phishing Threats Report here, as well as our recommendations for preventing successful phishing attacks. And if you’d like to see Cloudflare’s email security in action, you can request a free phishing risk assessment here.

Cloudflare Area 1 is a cloud-native email security service that identifies and blocks attacks before they hit user inboxes, enabling more effective protection against spear phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and other advanced threats. Cloudflare Area 1 is part of the Cloudflare Zero Trust platform and an essential component of a modern security and compliance strategy, helping organizations to reduce their attackers surface, detect and respond to threats faster, and improve compliance with industry regulations and security standards.

This announcement is another step in our commitment to remaining strong in our security posture.

Many customers want assurance that the sensitive information they send to us can be kept safe. One of the best ways to provide this assurance is a SOC 2 Type II report. We decided to obtain the report as it is the best way for us to demonstrate the controls we have in place to keep Cloudflare Area 1 and its infrastructure secure and available.  

Cloudflare Area 1’s SOC 2 Type II report covers a 3 month period from 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2023. Our auditors assessed the operating effectiveness of the 70 controls we’ve implemented to meet the Trust Services Criteria for Security, Confidentiality, and Availability.

We anticipate that the next ask from our customers will be for a SOC 2 Type II report that covers a longer reporting period, so we’ve decided to expand our scope for the Cloudflare Global Cloud Platform SOC 2 Type II report to be inclusive of Cloudflare Area 1 later on this year.

We are thrilled to reach this milestone and will continue to stay committed to be one of the most trusted platforms.

For a copy of Cloudflare Area 1’s SOC 2 Type II report, existing customers can obtain one through the Cloudflare Dashboard; new customers may also request a copy from your sales representative. For the latest information about our certifications and reports, please visit our Trust Hub.

Today, we are very excited to announce that Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution, Area 1, now integrates with KnowBe4, a leading security awareness training and simulated phishing platform. This integration allows mutual customers to offer real-time coaching to their employees when a phishing campaign is detected by Cloudflare’s email security solution.

We are all aware that phishing attacks often use email as a vector to deliver the fraudulent message. Cybercriminals use a range of tactics, such as posing as a trustworthy organization, using urgent or threatening language, or creating a sense of urgency to entice the recipient to click on a link or download an attachment.

Despite the increasing sophistication of these attacks and the solutions to stop them, human error remains the weakest link in this chain of events. This is because humans can be easily manipulated or deceived, especially when they are distracted or rushed. For example, an employee might accidentally click on a link in an email that looks legitimate but is actually a phishing attempt, or they might enter their password into a fake login page without realizing it. According to the 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, phishing was the most common form of social engineering attack, accounting for 36% of all breaches. The report also noted that 85% of all breaches involved a human element, such as human error or social engineering.

Therefore, it is essential to educate and train individuals on how to recognize and avoid phishing attacks. This includes raising awareness of common phishing tactics and training individuals to scrutinize emails carefully before clicking on any links or downloading attachments.

Our integration allows for the seamless integration of Cloudflare’s advanced email security capabilities with KnowBe4's Security Awareness Training platform, KSMAT, and its real-time coaching product, SecurityCoach. This means that organizations using both products can now benefit from an added layer of security that detects and prevents email-based threats in real-time while also training employees to recognize and avoid such threats.

Organizations can offer real-time security coaching to their employees whenever our email security solution detects four types of events: malicious attachments, malicious links, spoofed emails, and suspicious emails. IT or security professionals can configure their real-time coaching campaigns to immediately deliver relevant training to their users related to a detected event.

“KnowBe4 is proud to partner with Cloudflare to provide a seamless integration with our new SecurityCoach product, which aims to deliver real-time security coaching and advice to help end users enhance their cybersecurity knowledge and strengthen their role in contributing to a strong security culture. KnowBe4 is actively working with Cloudflare to provide an API-based integration to connect our platform with systems that IT/security professionals already utilize, making rolling out new products to their teams an easy and unified process.”- Stu Sjouwerman, CEO, KnowBe4

By using the integration, organizations can ensure that their employees are not only protected by advanced security technology that detects and blocks malicious emails, but are also educated on how to identify and avoid these threats. This has been a commonly demanded feature from our customers and we have made it simple for them to implement it.

Before you can set up this integration in your KnowBe4 (KMSAT) console, you will need to create a private key and public key with Cloudflare.

• Log in to your Cloudflare Area 1 email security console as an admin.

• Click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the page, and then navigate to the Service Accounts tab.

• Click + Add Service Account.

• In the NAME field, enter a name for your new service account.

• Click + Create Service Account.

• In the pop-up window that opens, copy and save the private key somewhere that you can easily access. You will need this key to complete the setup process in the Set Up the Integration in your KnowBe4 (KMSAT) Console section below.

Once you have created a private key and public key in your Cloudflare Area 1 email security console, you can set up the integration in your KMSAT console. To register Cloudflare Area 1 email security with SecurityCoach in your KMSAT console, follow the steps below:

• Log in to your KMSAT console and navigate to SecurityCoach > Setup > Security Vendor Integrations.

• Locate Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security and click Configure.

• Enter the Public Key and Private Key that you saved in the ‘Create your private Key and public key’ section above.

• Click authorize. Once you’ve successfully authorized this integration, you can manage detection rules for Cloudflare Area 1 on the ‘Detection rules subtab’ of SecurityCoach.

Now that the SecurityCoach is set up, users within your organization will receive messages if Area 1 finds that a malicious email was sent to them. An example one can be seen below.

This message not only alerts the user to be more scrutinous about emails they are receiving, since they now know they are being actively targeted, but also provides them with followup steps that they can take to ensure their account is as safe as possible. The image and text that shows up in the email can be configured from the KnowBe4 console giving customers full flexibility on what to communicate with their employees.

We’ll be expanding this integration with KnowBe4 to our other Zero Trust products in the coming months. If you have any questions or feedback on this integration, please contact your account team at Cloudflare. We’re excited to continue closely working with technology partners to expand existing and create new integrations that help customers on their Zero Trust journey.

At the end of 2021 Cloudflare launched Security Center, a unified solution that brings together our suite of security products and unique Internet intelligence. It enables security teams to quickly identify potential security risks and threats to their organizations, map their attack surface and mitigate these risks with just a few clicks. While Security Center initially focused on application security, we are now adding crucial zero trust insights to further enhance its capabilities.

When your brand is loved and trusted, customers and prospects are looking forward to the emails you send them. Now picture them receiving an email from you: it has your brand, the subject is exciting, it has a link to register for something unique — how can they resist that opportunity?

But what if that email didn’t come from you? What if clicking on that link is a scam that takes them down the path of fraud or identity theft? And what if they think you did it? The truth is, even security minded people occasionally fall for well crafted spoof emails.

That poses a risk to your business and reputation. A risk you don’t want to take - no one does. Brand impersonation is a significant problem for organizations globally, and that’s why we’ve built DMARC Management - available in Beta today.

With DMARC Management you have full insight on who is sending emails on your behalf. You can one-click approve each source that is a legitimate sender for your domain, and then set your DMARC policy to reject any emails sent from unapproved clients.

When the survey platform your company uses is sending emails from your domain, there’s nothing to worry about - you configured it that way. But if an unknown mail service from a remote country is sending emails using your domain that can be quite scary, and something you’ll want to address. Let’s see how.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) are three common email authentication methods. Together, they help prevent spammers, phishers, and other unauthorized parties from sending emails on behalf of a domain they do not own.

SPF is a way for a domain to list all the servers the company sends emails from. Think of it like a publicly available employee directory that helps someone to confirm if an employee works for an organization. SPF records list all the IP addresses of all the servers that are allowed to send emails from the domain.

DKIM enables domain owners to automatically "sign" emails from their domain. Specifically, DKIM uses public key cryptography:

1. A DKIM record stores the domain's public key, and mail servers receiving emails from the domain can check this record to obtain the public key.

2. The private key is kept secret by the sender, who signs the email's header with this key.

3. Mail servers receiving the email can verify that the sender's private key was used by applying the public key. This also guarantees that the email was not tampered with while in transit.

DMARC tells a receiving email server what to do after evaluating the SPF and DKIM results. A domain's DMARC policy can be set in a variety of ways — it can instruct mail servers to quarantine emails that fail SPF or DKIM (or both), to reject such emails, or to deliver them.

It’s not trivial to configure and maintain SPF and DMARC, though. If your configuration is too strict, legitimate emails will be dropped or marked as spam. If it’s too relaxed, your domain might be misused for email spoofing. The proof is that these authentication mechanisms (SPF / DKIM / DMARC) have existed for over 10 years and still, there are still less than 6 million active DMARC records.

DMARC reports can help, and a full solution like DMARC Management reduces the burden of creating and maintaining a proper configuration.

All DMARC-compliant mailbox providers support sending DMARC aggregated reports to an email address of your choice. Those reports list the services that have sent emails from your domain and the percentage of messages that passed DMARC, SPF and DKIM. They are extremely important because they give administrators the information they need to decide how to adjust their DMARC policies — for instance, that’s how administrators know if their legitimate emails are failing SPF and DKIM, or if a spammer is trying to send illegitimate emails.

But beware, you probably don’t want to send DMARC reports to a human-monitored email address, as these come in fast and furious from virtually every email provider your organization sends messages to, and are delivered in XML format. Typically, administrators set up reports to be sent to a service like our DMARC Management, that boils them down to a more digestible form. Note: These reports do not contain personal identifiable information (PII).

DMARC Management automatically creates an email address for those reports to be sent to, and adds the corresponding RUA record to your Cloudflare DNS to announce to mailbox providers where to send reports to. And yes, if you’re curious, these email addresses are being created using Cloudflare Email Routing.

Note: Today, Cloudflare DNS is a requirement for DMARC Management.

As reports are received in this dedicated email address, they are processed by a Worker that extracts the relevant data, parses it and sends it over to our analytics solution. And you guessed again, that’s implemented using Email Workers. You can read more about the technical implementation here.

Now that reports are coming in, you can review the data and take action.

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for mailbox providers to start sending reports and for these analytics to be available to you.

At the top of DMARC Management you have an at-a-glance view of the outbound security configuration for your domain, more specifically DMARC, DKIM, and SPF. DMARC Management will soon start reporting on inbound email security as well, which includes STARTTLS, MTA-STS, DANE, and TLS reporting.

The middle section shows the email volume over time, with individual lines showing those that pass DMARC and those that fail.

Below, you have additional details that include the number of email messages sent by each source (per the DMARC reports), and the corresponding DMARC, SPF and DKIM statistics. You can approve (that is, include in SPF) any of these sources by clicking on “…”, and you can easily spot applications that may not have DKIM correctly configured.

Clicking on any source gives you the same DMARC, SPF and DKIM statistics per IP address of that source. This is how you identify if there’s an additional IP address you might need to include in your SPF record, for example.

The ones that fail are the ones you’ll want to take action on, as they will need to either be approved (which technically means including in the SPF record) if legitimate, or stay unapproved and be rejected by the receiving server when the DMARC policy is configured with p=reject.

Getting to a DMARC reject policy is the goal, but you don’t want to apply such a restrictive policy until you have high confidence that all legitimate sending services are accounted for in SPF (and DKIM, if appropriate). That may take a few weeks, depending on the number of services you have sending messages from your domain, but with DMARC Management you will quickly grasp when you’re ready to go.

Once you have approved all your authorized email senders (sources) and configured DMARC to quarantine or reject, you should be confident that your brand and organization are much safer. From then on, keeping an eye on your approved sources list is a very lightweight operation that doesn’t take more than a few minutes per month from your team. Ideally, when new applications that send emails from your domain are deployed in your company, you would proactively include the corresponding IP addresses in your SPF record.

But even if you don’t, you will find new unapproved senders notices on your Security Center, under the Security Insights tab, alongside other important security issues you can review and manage.

Or you can check the unapproved list on DMARC Management every few weeks.

Whenever you see a legitimate sender source show up as unapproved, you know what to do — click “…” and mark them as approved!

DMARC Management takes email security to the next level, and this is only the beginning.

We’re excited to demonstrate our investments in features that provide customers even more insight into their security. Up next we’ll be connecting security analytics from Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) into the Security Center.

This product integration will provide customers a way to understand the status of their wider SaaS security at a glance. By surfacing the makeup of CASB Findings (or security issues identified in popular SaaS apps) by severity, health of the SaaS integration, and the number of hidden issues, IT and security administrators will have a way to understand the status of their wider security surface area from a single source.

Stay tuned for more news on CASB in Security Center. In the meantime you can join the waitlist for DMARC Management beta for free today and, if you haven’t yet, we recommend you also check out Cloudflare Area 1 and request a Phishing Risk Assessment to block phishing, spoof and spam emails from coming into your environment.

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It's an email authentication protocol that helps protect against email phishing and spoofing.

When an email is sent, DMARC allows the domain owner to set up a DNS record that specifies which authentication methods, such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), are used to verify the email's authenticity. When the email fails these authentication checks DMARC instructs the recipient's email provider on how to handle the message, either by quarantining it or rejecting it outright.

DMARC has become increasingly important in today's Internet, where email phishing and spoofing attacks are becoming more sophisticated and prevalent. By implementing DMARC, domain owners can protect their brand and their customers from the negative impacts of these attacks, including loss of trust, reputation damage, and financial loss.

In addition to protecting against phishing and spoofing attacks, DMARC also provides reporting capabilities. Domain owners can receive reports on email authentication activity, including which messages passed and failed DMARC checks, as well as where these messages originated from.

DMARC management involves the configuration and maintenance of DMARC policies for a domain. Effective DMARC management requires ongoing monitoring and analysis of email authentication activity, as well as the ability to make adjustments and updates to DMARC policies as needed.

Some key components of effective DMARC management include:

• Setting up DMARC policies: This involves configuring the domain's DMARC record to specify the appropriate authentication methods and policies for handling messages that fail authentication checks. Here’s what a DMARC DNS record looks like:

v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:dmarc@example.com

This specifies that we are going to use DMARC version 1, our policy is to reject emails if they fail the DMARC checks, and the email address to which providers should send DMARC reports.

• Monitoring email authentication activity: DMARC reports are an important tool for domain owners to ensure email security and deliverability, as well as compliance with industry standards and regulations. By regularly monitoring and analyzing DMARC reports, domain owners can identify email threats, optimize email campaigns, and improve overall email authentication.

• Making adjustments as needed: Based on analysis of DMARC reports, domain owners may need to make adjustments to DMARC policies or authentication methods to ensure that email messages are properly authenticated and protected from phishing and spoofing attacks.

• Working with email providers and third-party vendors: Effective DMARC management may require collaboration with email providers and third-party vendors to ensure that DMARC policies are being properly implemented and enforced.

Today we launched DMARC management. This is how we built it.

As a leading provider of cloud-based security and performance solutions, we at Cloudflare take a specific approach to test our products. We "dogfood" our own tools and services, which means we use them to run our business. This helps us identify any issues or bugs before they affect our customers.

We use our own products internally, such as Cloudflare Workers, a serverless platform that allows developers to run their code on our global network. Since its launch in 2017, the Workers ecosystem has grown significantly. Today, there are thousands of developers building and deploying applications on the platform. The power of the Workers ecosystem lies in its ability to enable developers to build sophisticated applications that were previously impossible or impractical to run so close to clients. Workers can be used to build APIs, generate dynamic content, optimize images, perform real-time processing, and much more. The possibilities are virtually endless. We used Workers to power services like Radar 2.0, or software packages like Wildebeest.

Recently our Email Routing product joined forces with Workers, enabling processing incoming emails via Workers scripts. As the documentation states: “With Email Workers you can leverage the power of Cloudflare Workers to implement any logic you need to process your emails and create complex rules. These rules determine what happens when you receive an email.” Rules and verified addresses can all be configured via our API.

Here’s how a simple Email Worker looks like:

export default {
  async email(message, env, ctx) {
    const allowList = ["friend@example.com", "coworker@example.com"];
    if (allowList.indexOf(message.headers.get("from")) == -1) {
      message.setReject("Address not allowed");
    } else {
      await message.forward("inbox@corp");
    }
  }
}

Pretty straightforward, right?

With the ability to programmatically process incoming emails in place, it seemed like the perfect way to handle incoming DMARC report emails in a scalable and efficient manner, letting Email Routing and Workers do the heavy lifting of receiving an unbound number of emails from across the globe. A high level description of what we needed is:

1. Receive email and extract report

2. Publish relevant details to analytics platform

3. Store the raw report

Email Workers enable us to do #1 easily. We just need to create a worker with an email() handler. This handler will receive the SMTP envelope elements, a pre-parsed version of the email headers, and a stream to read the entire raw email.

For #2 we can also look into the Workers platform, and we will find the Workers Analytics Engine. We just need to define an appropriate schema, which depends both on what’s present in the reports and the queries we plan to do later. Afterwards we can query the data using either the GraphQL or SQL API.

For #3 we don’t need to look further than our R2 object storage. It is trivial to access R2 from a Worker. After extracting the reports from the email we will store them in R2 for posterity.

We built this as a managed service that you can enable on your zone, and added a dashboard interface for convenience, but in reality all the tools are available for you to deploy your own DMARC reports processor on top of Cloudflare Workers, in your own account, without having to worry about servers, scalability or performance.

Email Workers is a feature of our Email Routing product. The Email Routing component runs in all our nodes, so any one of them is able to process incoming mail, which is important because we announce the Email ingress BGP prefix from all our datacenters. Sending emails to an Email Worker is as easy as setting a rule in the Email Routing dashboard.

When the Email Routing component receives an email that matches a rule to be delivered to a Worker, it will contact our internal version of the recently open-sourced workerd runtime, which also runs on all nodes. The RPC schema that governs this interaction is defined in a Capnproto schema, and allows the body of the email to be streamed to Edgeworker as it’s read. If the worker script decides to forward this email, Edgeworker will contact Email Routing using a capability sent in the original request.

jsg::Promise<void> ForwardableEmailMessage::forward(kj::String rcptTo, jsg::Optional<jsg::Ref<Headers>> maybeHeaders) {
  auto req = emailFwdr->forwardEmailRequest();
  req.setRcptTo(rcptTo);

  auto sendP = req.send().then(
      [](capnp::Response<rpc::EmailMetadata::EmailFwdr::ForwardEmailResults> res) mutable {
    auto result = res.getResponse().getResult();
    JSG_REQUIRE(result.isOk(), Error, result.getError());
  });
  auto& context = IoContext::current();
  return context.awaitIo(kj::mv(sendP));
}

In the context of DMARC reports this is how we handle the incoming emails:

1. Fetch the recipient of the email being processed, this is the RUA that was used. RUA is a DMARC configuration parameter that indicates where aggregate DMARC processing feedback should be reported pertaining to a certain domain. This recipient can be found in the “to” attribute of the message.

const ruaID = message.to

1. Since we handle DMARC reports for an unbounded number of domains, we use Workers KV to store some information about each one and key this information on the RUA. This also lets us know if we should be receiving these reports.

const accountInfoRaw = await env.KV_DMARC_REPORTS.get(dmarc:${ruaID})

1. At this point, we want to read the entire email into an arrayBuffer in order to parse it. Depending on the size of the report we may run into the limits of the free Workers plan. If this happens, we recommend that you switch to the Workers Unbound resource model which does not have this issue.

const rawEmail = new Response(message.raw)
const arrayBuffer = await rawEmail.arrayBuffer()

1. Parsing the raw email involves, among other things, parsing its MIME parts. There are multiple libraries available that allow one to do this. For example, you could use postal-mime:

const parser = new PostalMime.default()
const email = await parser.parse(arrayBuffer)

1. Having parsed the email we now have access to its attachments. These attachments are the DMARC reports themselves and they can be compressed. The first thing we want to do is store them in their compressed form in R2 for long-term storage. They can be useful later on for re-processing or investigating interesting reports. Doing this is as simple as calling put() on the R2 binding. In order to facilitate retrieval later we recommend that you spread the report files across directories based on the current time.

await env.R2_DMARC_REPORTS.put(
    `${date.getUTCFullYear()}/${date.getUTCMonth() + 1}/${attachment.filename}`,
    attachment.content
  )

1. We now need to look into the attachment mime type. The raw form of DMARC reports is XML, but they can be compressed. In this case we need to decompress them first. DMARC reporter files can use multiple compression algorithms. We use the MIME type to know which one to use. For Zlib compressed reports pako can be used while for ZIP compressed reports unzipit is a good choice.

2. Having obtained the raw XML form of the report, fast-xml-parser has worked well for us in parsing them. Here’s how the DMARC report XML looks:

<feedback>
  <report_metadata>
    <org_name>example.com</org_name>
    <emaildmarc-reports@example.com</email>
   <extra_contact_info>http://example.com/dmarc/support</extra_contact_info>
    <report_id>9391651994964116463</report_id>
    <date_range>
      <begin>1335521200</begin>
      <end>1335652599</end>
    </date_range>
  </report_metadata>
  <policy_published>
    <domain>business.example</domain>
    <adkim>r</adkim>
    <aspf>r</aspf>
    <p>none</p>
    <sp>none</sp>
    <pct>100</pct>
  </policy_published>
  <record>
    <row>
      <source_ip>192.0.2.1</source_ip>
      <count>2</count>
      <policy_evaluated>
        <disposition>none</disposition>
        <dkim>fail</dkim>
        <spf>pass</spf>
      </policy_evaluated>
    </row>
    <identifiers>
      <header_from>business.example</header_from>
    </identifiers>
    <auth_results>
      <dkim>
        <domain>business.example</domain>
        <result>fail</result>
        <human_result></human_result>
      </dkim>
      <spf>
        <domain>business.example</domain>
        <result>pass</result>
      </spf>
    </auth_results>
  </record>
</feedback>

1. We now have all the data in the report at our fingertips. What we do from here on depends a lot on how we want to present the data. For us, the goal was to display meaningful data extracted from them in our Dashboard. Therefore we needed an Analytics platform where we could push the enriched data. Enter, Workers Analytics Engine. The Analytics engine is perfect for this task since it allows us to send data to it from a worker, and exposes a GraphQL API to interact with the data afterwards. This is how we obtain the data to show in our dashboard.

In the future, we are also considering integrating Queues in the workflow to asynchronously process the report and avoid waiting for the client to complete it.

We managed to implement this project end-to-end relying only on the Workers infrastructure, proving that it’s possible, and advantageous, to build non-trivial apps without having to worry about scalability, performance, storage and security issues.

As we mentioned before, we built a managed service that you can enable and use, and we will manage it for you. But, everything we did can also be deployed by you, in your account, so that you can manage your own DMARC reports. It’s easy, and free. To help you with that, we are releasing an open-source version of a Worker that processes DMARC reports in the way described above: https://github.com/cloudflare/dmarc-email-worker

If you don’t have a dashboard where to show the data, you can also query the Analytics Engine from a Worker. Or, if you want to store them in a relational database, then there’s D1 to the rescue. The possibilities are endless and we are excited to find out what you’ll build with these tools.

Please contribute, make your own, we’ll be listening.

We hope that this post has furthered your understanding of the Workers platform. Today Cloudflare takes advantage of this platform to build most of our services, and we think you should too.

Feel free to contribute to our open-source version and show us what you can do with it.

The Email Routing is also working on expanding the Email Workers API more functionally, but that deserves another blog soon.