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.

We understand that one of the significant hurdles faced by our customers, especially larger organizations, is obtaining a clear view of the deployment of Cloudflare services throughout their vast and complex infrastructures. The question isn't just whether Cloudflare is deployed, but whether it's fully optimized across every asset and service. Addressing this challenge head-on, we're rolling out a new feature set designed to provide better visibility and control over your security posture.

The core problem we're tackling is the growing complexity of cyber threats and the expanding attack surface, which complicates maintaining a strong security posture for our customers.

It's not uncommon for organizations to deploy a variety of security solutions, including ours, without fully optimizing and implementing their configurations. This results in a false sense of security, underutilized investments and, more critically, exposed vulnerabilities. Our customers frequently express concerns about not having a clear picture of their security posture across their entire infrastructure, uncertain if critical assets are adequately protected or if specific Cloudflare security features could be better leveraged.

We want to bring users comprehensive visibility into their security configurations and the state of their deployments across Cloudflare's suite of products. By providing actionable insights into underconfigured areas, unassigned resources, or unutilized features, we aim to close the security gaps and enhance the overall defense mechanisms of our customers' digital ecosystems. This improvement is not just about leveraging technology but about promoting a culture of proactive security management, where every piece of the digital infrastructure is consistently and optimally protected.

More than two years ago, we took on the mission to consolidate our extensive suite of security products, security expertise, and our unique insights into Internet threats into one comprehensive solution — the Cloudflare Security Center. Launched with the vision to simplify attack surface management and make advanced security intelligence actionable for organizations of all sizes, Security Center has since become the one-stop quick view to evaluate your security posture.

Today, we build on this foundation to address a pain point for many of our large customers: ensuring complete Cloudflare protection across their entire digital infrastructure.

Our latest update in the Security Center focuses on delivering detailed insights into Cloudflare's deployment status across your digital assets. This encompasses identifying applications where critical services like WAF, Access, and other security protection tools might not be fully configured or optimized, thereby weakening your security posture.

In addition to these insights, we are introducing a quick view within Security Center Insights, designed to offer CISOs and security teams a quick and comprehensive view of their current Cloudflare product configurations at any given moment, along with recommendations for enhancements, under the Security optimization snapshot on the dashboard.

Leveraging these new insights, Cloudflare users can now take proactive steps to close any gaps in their security framework. By offering a granular view of where specific Cloudflare services can be better utilized, we're not just solving a visibility problem — we're delivering actionable security intelligence. This means decisions can be made swiftly, ensuring that your defenses not only keep pace with, but stay ahead of, potential threats.

For instance, we'll highlight if WAF is deployed on only a portion of your zones, where Email Security could be leveraged, or if certain assets are unprotected by Access controls. We’re also making it easier for you to see if you are missing any critical setup like Page Shield, ensuring the product is configured, so you are not just one step closer to becoming compliant with standards like PCI DSS, but are also protected against evolving threats. We are outlining newly discovered API endpoints that require your attention as well.

Finally, users can now export their Security Insights using our public API, and will soon be able to do the same directly from the Cloudflare Dashboard, with a simple click of a button!

Security Center Insights is available to all Cloudflare dashboard users that are Administrators of their Cloudflare account.

Regardless of the size or scope of your deployment, our goal is to empower every user with the tools needed to achieve a robust security posture, which they can continuously influence by improving existing configurations, adding new solutions, and discovering new vulnerabilities.

We’re constantly adding other relevant security insights to help improve your security posture, covering exposed infrastructure, insecure configurations, optimisations, new products, and more, including the ability to easily export these for reporting purposes. Moreover, stay tuned for a completely new reporting platform that will automatically deliver curated and contextualized security insights directly into your inbox — showcasing the power of Cloudflare’s security portfolio. The periodic reports will be complemented by a personalized interactive in-dashboard reporting experience.

Check out your security insights under your account’s Security Center now and take action to improve your security posture with Cloudflare!

If you would like to join us in building the Security Center or other exciting Cloudflare products, see our open positions and learn more about life@Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team, Cloudforce One, is now open for business and has begun conducting threat briefings. Access to the team is available via an add-on subscription, and includes threat data and briefings, security tools, and the ability to make requests for information (RFIs) to the team.

Fill out this form or contact your account team to learn more.

Subscriptions come in two packages, and are priced based on number of employees: “Premier” includes our full history of threat data, bundled RFIs, and an API quota designed to support integrations with SIEMs. “Core” level includes reduced history and quotas. Both packages include access to all available security tools, including a threat investigation portal and sinkholes-as-a-service.

If you’re an enterprise customer interested in understanding the type of threat briefings that Cloudforce One customers receive, you can register here for “YackingYeti: How a Russian threat group targets Ukraine—and the world”, scheduled for October 12. The briefing will include Q&A with Blake Darché, head of Cloudforce One, and an opportunity to learn more about the team and offering.

The Cloudforce One team is composed of analysts assigned to five subteams: Malware Analysis, Threat Analysis, Active Mitigation and Countermeasures, Intelligence Analysis, and Intelligence Sharing. Collectively, they have tracked many of the most sophisticated cyber criminals on the Internet while at the National Security Agency (NSA), USCYBERCOM, and Area 1 Security, and have worked closely with similar organizations and governments to disrupt these threat actors. They’ve also been prolific in publishing “finished intel” reports on security topics of significant geopolitical importance, such as targeted attacks against governments, technology companies, the energy sector, and law firms, and have regularly briefed top organizations around the world on their efforts.

Included with a Cloudforce One subscription is the ability to make “requests for information” (RFIs) to these experts. RFIs can be on any security topic of interest, and will be analyzed and responded to in a timely manner. For example, the Cloudforce One Malware Analysis team can accept uploads of possible malware and provide a technical analysis of the submitted resource. Each plan level comes with a fixed number of RFIs, and additional requests can be added.

In addition to customer-specific requests, Cloudforce One conducts regular briefings on a variety of threats and threat actors—those targeting specific industries as well as more general topics of interest.

The best way to understand threats facing networks and applications connected to the Internet is to operate and protect critical, large scale Internet infrastructure. And to defend attacks against millions of customers, large and small. Since our early days, Cloudflare has set out to build one of the world’s largest global networks to do just that. Every day we answer trillions of DNS queries, track the issuance of millions SSL/TLS certificates in our CT log, inspect millions of emails for threats, route multiple petabytes of traffic to our customers’ networks, and proxy trillions of HTTP requests destined for our customers’ applications. Each one of these queries and packets provides a unique data point that can be analyzed at scale and anonymized into actionable threat data—now available to our Cloudforce One customers.

Data sets now available in the dashboard and via API for subscribers include IP, ASN, and domain intelligence, passive DNS resolutions; threat actor cards with indicators of compromise (IoC), open port, and new Managed IP Lists are planned for release later this year.

Security analysts and threat hunting teams are being forced to do more with less in today’s operating environment, but that doesn’t reduce their need for reliable tools that can quickly identify and eliminate risks.

Bundled with Cloudforce One are several security tools that can be deployed as services to expedite threat hunting and remediation:

• Located within Security Center, the Investigate tab is your portal for querying current and historical threat data on IPs, ASNs, URLs (new!), and domains.

• URLs can now be scanned for phishing contents, with heuristic and machine learning-scored results presented on demand.

• Also located within the Security Center, the Brand Protection tab can be used to register keywords or assets (e.g., corporate logos, etc.) that customers wish to be notified of when they appear on the Internet.

• Sinkholes can be created on-demand, as a service, to monitor hosts infected with malware and prevent them from communicating with command-and-control (C2) servers.

• After creating a sinkhole via API, an IP will be returned which can be used with DNS products like Cloudflare Gateway to route web requests to safe sinkholes (and away from C2 servers). Sinkholes can be used to intercept SMTP traffic.

• Premier customers can also bring their own IP address space to use for sinkholes, to accommodate egress firewall filtering or other use cases. In the future we plan to extend our sinkhole capability to the network layer, which will allow it to be deployed alongside offerings such as Magic Transit and Magic WAN.

Cloudforce One is open for business and ready to answer your security inquiries. Speak to your account manager or fill out this form to learn more. We hope to see you on the upcoming webinar!

Cloudflare blocks a lot of diverse security threats, with some of the more interesting attacks targeting the “long tail” of the millions of Internet properties we protect. The data we glean from these attacks trains our machine learning models and improves the efficacy of our network and application security products, but historically hasn’t been available to query directly. This week, we’re changing that.

All customers will soon be granted access to our new threat investigations portal, Investigate, in the Cloudflare Security Center (first launched in December 2021). Additionally, we’ll be annotating threats across our analytics platform with this intelligence to streamline security workflows and tighten feedback loops.

What sorts of data might you want to look up here? Let’s say you’re seeing an IP address in your logs and want to learn which hostnames have pointed to it via DNS, or you’re seeing a cluster of attacks come from an autonomous system (AS) you’re not familiar with. Or maybe you want to investigate a domain name to see how it’s been categorized from a threat perspective. Simply enter any of those items into the omni search box, and we’ll tell you everything we know.

IPs and hostnames will be available to query this week, followed by AS details to give you insight into the networks that communicate with your Cloudflare accounts. Next month as we move to general availability we’ll add data types and properties. Integrations with partners will allow you to use your existing license keys to see all your threat data in a single, unified interface. We also plan to show how both your infrastructure and corporate employees are interacting with any objects you look up, e.g., you can see how many times an IP triggers a WAF or API Shield rule, or how many times your employees attempted to resolve a domain that’s known to serve malware.

Looking up threat data on an ad hoc basis is great, but it’s better when that data is annotated directly in logs and analytics. Starting this week, we will begin rolling out intelligence that is available in Investigate in the dashboard where it is relevant to your workflow. We’re starting with the web application firewall analytics for your websites that are behind Cloudflare.

Say you are investigating a security alert for a large number of requests that are blocked by a web application firewall rule. You might see that the alert was caused by an IP address probing your website for commonly exploited software vulnerabilities. If the IP in question were a cloud IP or flagged as an anonymizer, contextual intelligence will show that information directly on the analytics page.

This context can help you see patterns. Are attacks coming from anonymizers or the Tor network? Are they coming from cloud virtual machines? An IP is just an IP. But seeing a credential stuffing attack coming from anonymizers is a pattern that enables a proactive response, “Is my bot management configuration up-to-date?”

The scale at which each product suite operates at Cloudflare is staggering. At peak, Cloudflare handles 44 million HTTP requests a second, from more than 250 cities in over 100 countries. The Cloudflare network responds to over 1.2 trillion DNS queries per day, and it has 121 Tbps of network capacity to serve traffic and mitigate denial of service attacks across all products. But on top of this immense scale, Cloudflare’s architecture enables refining raw data and combining intelligence from all of our products to paint a holistic picture of the security landscape.

We are able to take signals refined from the raw data generated by each product and combine them with signals from other products and capabilities to enhance our network and threat data capabilities. It is a common paradigm for security products to be built to have positive flywheel effects among users of the products. If one customer sees a new piece of malware, an endpoint protection vendor can deploy an update that will detect and block this malware for all their other customers. If a botnet attacks one customer, this provides information that can be used to find the signature of that botnet and protect other customers. If a device participates in a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, that information can be used to make the network able to faster detect and mitigate future DDoS attacks. Cloudflare’s breadth of product offerings means that the flywheel effect benefits to users accumulate not just between users, but between products as well.

Let’s look at some examples:

First, Cloudflare operates 1.1.1.1, one of the largest recursive DNS resolvers in the world. We operate it in a privacy-forward manner, so here at Cloudflare we do not know who or what IP performed a query, nor are we able to correlate queries together to distinct anonymous users. However, through the requests the resolver handles, Cloudflare sees newly registered and newly seen domains. Additionally, Cloudflare has one of the most advanced SSL/TLS encryption products on the market, and as part of that is a member organization helping to maintain the Certificate Transparency logs. These are public logs of every TLS certificate issued by a root certificate authority that is trusted by web browsers. Between these two products, Cloudflare has an unmatched view of what domains are out there on the Internet and when they become active. We use this information not only to populate our new and newly seen domains categories for our Gateway product, but we feed these domains into machine learning models that label suspicious or potentially malicious domains early in their lifecycle.

As another example, with the acquisition of Area 1, Cloudflare will bring a new set of mutually-reinforcing capabilities into its product offering. All the signals we can generate for a domain from our 1.1.1.1 resolver will become available to help identify malicious email, and Area 1’s years of expertise in identifying malicious email will be able to feed back into Cloudflare’s Gateway product and 1.1.1.1 for Families DNS resolver. In the past, data integrations like this would have been performed by IT or security teams. Instead, data will be able to flow seamlessly between the points on your organization’s attack surface, mutually reinforcing the quality of the analysis and classification. The entire Cloudflare Zero Trust toolkit, including request logging, blocking, and remote browser isolation will be available to handle potentially malicious links delivered via email, using the same policies already in place for other security risks.

Over the last few years, Cloudflare has integrated the use of machine learning in many of our product offerings, but today we’ve launched a new tool that puts the data and signals that power our network security into our customer’s hands as well. Whether responding to security incidents, threat hunting, or proactively setting security policies to protect for your organization, you, human, can now be part of the Cloudflare network as well. Cloudflare’s unique position in the network means that your insights can be fed back into the network to protect not just your organization across all Cloudflare products it uses, but also can participate in mutual insight and defense among all Cloudflare customers.

Cloudflare can cover your organization’s whole attack surface: defending websites, protecting devices and SaaS applications with Cloudflare Zero Trust, your locations and offices with Magic Transit, and your email communications. Security Center is here to make sure you have all the information you need to understand the cyber security risks present today, and to help you defend your organization using Cloudflare.

“What is the wiper malware that I hear about on the news, and how do I protect my company from it?” We hear your questions, and we’re going to give you answers. Not just raw information, but what is relevant to you and how you use the Internet. We have big plans for Security Center. A file scanning portal will provide you with information about JavaScript files seen by Page Shield, executable files scanned by Gateway, and the ability to upload and scan files. Indicators of Compromise like IP addresses and domains will link to information about the relevant threat actors, when known, giving you more information about the techniques and tactics you are faced with, and information about how Cloudflare products can be used to defend against them. CVE search will let you find information on software vulnerabilities, along with the same easy-to-understand Cloudflare perspective you are used to reading on this blog to help decode the jargon and technical language. With today’s release, we’re just getting started.