Hackers love the holidays
December 21, 2012
Looking at the latest DDoS attack statistics from CloudFlare's network, it seems that hackers love the holidays....
Ceasefires Don't End Cyberwars
November 27, 2012
There is a significant conflict in the Middle East. As has been widely reported, along with the physical confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinians, there have been widespread cyber attacks....
Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
November 06, 2012
Today, Google's services experienced a limited outage for about 27 minutes over some portions of the Internet. The reason this happened dives into the deep, dark corners of networking. ...
What Happens When a Hurricane Hits the Web
October 31, 2012
Now that Hurricane Sandy has passed and the flood waters have begun to recede, we wanted to recap what we saw over the last 24 hours across the CloudFlare network....
Deep Inside a DNS Amplification DDoS Attack
October 30, 2012
A few weeks ago I wrote about DNS Amplification Attacks. These attacks are some of the largest, as measured by the number of Gigabits per second (Gbps), that we see directed toward our network....
MORE POSTS
September 25, 2012
CloudFlare protects Einstein's brain!
CloudFlare protects a lot of websites - from eCommerce websites to blogs to SMBs to government sites, and everything in between....
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September 17, 2012
How to Launch a 65Gbps DDoS, and How to Stop One
Yesterday I posted a post mortem on an outage we had Saturday. The outage was caused when we applied an overly aggressive rate limit to traffic on our network while battling a determined DDoS attacker. ...
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September 05, 2012
SmartErrors: Decrease Your Site's Bounce Rate
Visitors dread them, publishers fear them and we've all seen them. Page Not Found errors (also known as 404s) are a common occurrence on the web where content is constantly created and discarded. However, few things increase a site's bounce rate faster. ...
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August 28, 2012
Turning "I'm Under Attack" into "I'm Doing Some Good"
CloudFlare's I'm Under Attack mode allows our customers to, at the click of a button, tell us that they are experiencing an attack and enable automatic protection. It works by slowing down visits to the web site that's under attack and performing extra work to identify malicious ...
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August 16, 2012
Saturday Night Fever: Layer 7 attacks against CloudFlare sites
Recently, I've taken a look at DDoS attacks against CloudFlare sites at the IP level and the source of those attacks. The worst time for those DDoS attacks is the Wednesday Witching Hour and because of source IP address forgery most of the attacks seem to come from Mars. ...
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August 06, 2012
Mars Attacks!
Following on from my recent post about when attacks hit CloudFlare, here's a follow up looking at where they come from. Or at least where they say they come from. Looking at attack statistics for the month of July 2012 the largest source of attacks is Mars....
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August 05, 2012
Always Online v.2
The video on CloudFlare's home page promises that we will keep your web page online "even if your server goes down." It's a feature we dubbed "Always Online" and, when it works, it's magical. The problem is, Always Online doesn't always work....
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August 03, 2012
The Wednesday Witching Hour: CloudFlare DoS Statistics
Data from inside CloudFlare's network shows that over 40% of the time there's a denial of service attack happening and directed at us. And that's just up to network layer 4 (i.e. it doesn't include more sophisticated attacks targeting applications themselves at layer 7)....
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May 20, 2012
DNSChanger Update: Nearly 4% of Infections Already Detected
Just a quick update on the initiative between CloudFlare, OpenDNS, and the DCWG to clean up the DNSChanger malware. In the last week, just over 11,000 websites enabled the Visitor DNSChanger Detector App through CloudFlare....
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April 11, 2012
Introducing: I'm Under Attack Mode
CloudFlare provides a broad level of protection from a wide range of attacks. We do this while minimizing false positives or annoyances to legitimate customers. CloudFlare didn't begin as a DDoS mitigation service, but we've rapidly found that we are good at it....
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February 20, 2012
Introducing Page Rules: Fine Grained Control over CloudFlare's Features
CloudFlare is provisioned by DNS. That means that, from the beginning, you've been able to turn CloudFlare on or off on a subdomain level. From the CloudFlare DNS Manager. Often, however, users have wanted finer-grained control. ...
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January 26, 2012
TODAY Show Traffic Spike No Problem For Khataland
Today comes every day. But promotion on the TODAY Show comes along rarely, if at all. The TODAY Show is the top morning TV show in America, with more than 5 million viewers each day....
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December 21, 2011
2011: The Year of the DDoS
As the year comes to a close, we've been assembling trend data for 2011. One of the most interesting has been the rise of denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Controlling for CloudFlare's growth, we've seen a 700% increase in DDoS attacks over the course of the year....
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December 15, 2011
Do Hackers Take the Holidays Off?
I was talking last week with Shawn Graham, a reporter at Fast Company, and he asked a simple but interesting question: do hackers take the holidays off?...
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