Photo Credit: Texas Military Department (Flickr) Hurricane Harvey hit Texas last Friday as a Category 4 storm. Although Harvey's category was quickly downgraded, the storm lingered around for days, bringing 50 inches of rain to the greater Houston area. As someone who was born in Houston, it's hard to see my former city hit with such destruction, and to know that many of my friends and fellow Houstonians…
Introduction On August 17th, 2017, multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and content providers were subject to significant attacks from a botnet dubbed WireX. The botnet is named for an anagram for one of the delimiter strings in its command and control protocol. The WireX botnet comprises primarily Android devices running malicious applications and is designed to create DDoS traffic. The botnet is sometimes associated with ransom notes to…
Today Cloudflare serves nearly 10% of all global internet requests and more than 80% of our customers are based outside of the United States. Cloudflare is rapidly growing and there is nothing more important to us than being able to better serve our users across the world beyond our global offices in San Francisco, Austin, Champaign, Washington D.C., New York, London, and Singapore. Earlier this year, we…
A game-changer The road towards implementation of the new European GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) has been a long one, even though public awareness of its impact, especially outside of Europe, is only now really starting to take hold. This game-changing piece of EU legislation will require companies to fundamentally change how they process and use personal data (broadly defined) they receive from EU citizens, including through…
Hardenize is a comprehensive security tool that continuously monitors the security and configuration of your domain name, email, and website. Ivan Ristić, the author of Hardenize, gave a demo of his app at our Cloudflare London HQ. Do you know how secure your site is? View a Hardenize report on your website by clicking this button: Interested in sharing a demo of your app at a meetup? We…
As opposed to the public telephone network, the internet has a Packet Switched design. But just how big can these packets be? CC BY 2.0 image by ajmexico, inspired by This is an old question and the IPv4 RFCs answer it pretty clearly. The idea was to split the problem into two separate concerns: What is the maximum packet size that can be handled by operating systems…
Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the…
At approximately 4:50pm local time (8:50am UTC) August 15, a major unexpected power outage hit the island of Taiwan with a significant amount of its power generation facilities going down. Blackout! Most of the island was hit with power outages, shortages and rolling blackouts, with street lights not functioning, nor power in many of Taipei’s shopping malls, and much other infrastructure. Blackouts of this scale…