Post Syndicated from Azmina Hashim original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-helps-protect-small-businesses/

Large-scale cyber attacks on enterprises and governments make the headlines, but the impacts of cyberattacks can be felt acutely by small businesses that struggle to keep the lights on during normal times. In this blog, we’ll share new research on how small businesses, including those using our free services, have leveraged Cloudflare services to make their businesses more secure and resistant to disruption, along with a real story about how Cloudflare makes a tangible impact for small business customers.

Research has indicated that 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses [Source: Institute for Security and Technology, Blueprint for Ransomware Defense, 2022]. Small businesses face many of the same cybersecurity challenges as larger organizations, but with fewer resources to plan, design, and manage their IT systems and security protections. Most small businesses say they don’t have the personnel to address IT security adequately or appropriately [Source: Ponemon Institute, 2018 State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium Size Businesses].

Your local florist, fitness studio, café, or pet shop is likely using a wide variety of cloud-based SaaS apps to stay open for customers, including online accounting software, booking systems, point-of-sale credit card readers, inventory management systems, content management systems, and cloud email providers. Each of these systems can be compromised and used to launch an attack. As the global pandemic showed us, small businesses operate with tight margins and very little room for any sort of disruption to daily operations.

While larger enterprises may be able to absorb the temporary loss of revenue from a system outage or a ransomware attack, small business owners can quickly find themselves headed for disaster after just a short period of degraded service quality or system outages. Without a full time security operations center at their disposal or even a dedicated IT staff to focus attention on security issues, small business owners might feel powerless to predict, stop, or mitigate any cyber attacks that could affect their bottom lines and, more worryingly, their livelihoods.

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. We believe the Internet should be open and free, and that all Internet properties, no matter how small, should be safe, secure, and fast. We believe that every website should have access to the best security and performance available, whether that website belongs to a large multinational corporation, a local non-profit organization, a global human rights advocacy group, an institution of higher learning, or a clothing boutique with a single location in a small town. And most importantly, we believe that everyone on the Internet deserves protection against cyber attacks, even if they use a Free plan and don’t spend any money with Cloudflare.

Small business users

We identified over 94,000 small customers using at least one Cloudflare service, such as small businesses. What do some of these small customers look like? One is a small clothing and apparel company based in Central Europe. Another is a popular coffee shop in Southeast Asia. The largest group of small customers (around 30%) are located in the United States, though they are present across North America, Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia.

*Small Customer Accounts Top Ten Locations

In 2022, these small businesses and organizations were responsible for over seven billion cached requests per day. We identified over 38,000 Layer 3 DDoS attacks that Cloudflare helped mitigate for small customers in 2022. For small businesses, stopping a cyber attack means keeping their doors open – and potentially keeping their businesses afloat.

Free plan users

What about the users on Free plans? As of December 2022, we identified 4.2 million Cloudflare accounts using only services available in our Free plan – representing a 40% increase year-over-year from 2021. Together, these Free plan customers were responsible for roughly 70 trillion requests over the Cloudflare network in 2022 – a value of $7 million of content delivery network services that they received at no cost. Many of our Free plan users are also leveraging Cloudflare Access for free, with over two million free Access seats currently in use.

With so many Free plan users, it can be challenging to know what impact these aggregate numbers have on the individuals who run these accounts. That’s why we were pleased to speak with a user on a Free plan who shared their story.

Customer story

A small local hosting company in the southern United States has the responsibility to protect the websites they host, which all belong to small local businesses – the florists, bakeries, and pet shops who are spending their time and resources supporting the local community and who cannot afford to experience downtime from a cyber attack. Some of these websites have e-commerce capabilities, while others contain WordPress sites. Other properties have some level of customized development in need of protection from SQL injections, spoofing, bot scraping attacks, and other malicious activities. While these small business websites are not being specifically targeted by cyber attackers (and instead experience broad, less focused attacks on a wide range of IP addresses) they suffer the same consequences of reduced performance, downtime, and business disruption as larger properties would.

To help mitigate these consequences, the hosting provider uses our free WAF Managed Ruleset and Bot Fight Mode capabilities to protect customer properties. Cloudflare offers another layer of protection and peace of mind for the websites of small businesses to remain operational. By using Cloudflare’s free services, the hosting provider has significantly reduced the large volumes of malicious traffic coming in from overseas IPs. Since the businesses are small and local, any traffic coming from outside the country is unlikely to be a local customer and clearly is not there to transact with the local businesses.

This hosting provider said that their use of Cloudflare had also cut down on their bandwidth egress fees by $100 per month. That may not seem like much from the perspective of a large enterprise – but it adds up quickly for a smaller company. By caching requests through Cloudflare’s network, the provider also reduces server load, so they have more capacity to handle attacks. Most importantly, the hosting provider finds Cloudflare intuitive to deploy and use, and straightforward to customize for the specific needs of the small business websites that need protection.

We closed our conversation with one final thought: “I can’t believe you’re doing this for free!”

No business of any size should have to face cyber attacks alone, whether they are a paying customer or not. Cloudflare is trusted by millions of Internet properties, from the largest global companies to your corner grocery store. Getting started with Cloudflare is simple, fast, and straightforward. You can sign up for a Free plan in minutes to get the tools you need to secure and accelerate your web presence and keep your small business thriving.

Post Syndicated from James Allworth original https://blog.cloudflare.com/two-months-later-internet-use-in-iran-during-the-mahsa-amini-protests/

A series of protests began in Iran on September 16, following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini — a 22-year-old who had been arrested for violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law. The protests and civil unrest have continued to this day. But the impact hasn’t just been on the ground in Iran — the impact of the civil unrest can be seen in Internet usage inside the country, as well.

With the proliferation of smartphones and the ubiquity of the Internet that has resulted, it’s no longer simply the offline world impacting the Internet; what happens on the Internet is impacting the offline world, too. For that reason, it’s not surprising that in order to limit the spread of the protests — both news of it happening and the further organization of civil unrest — the Iranian government introduced limits on the Internet. This included banning certain social media and communications tools: most notably including Instagram and WhatsApp, which are estimated to be used by over 50% of the Iranian population.

But despite the threat that the protests pose, and the Internet’s enabling role in them, it has not been cut off altogether. In fact, from the perspective of Cloudflare, Internet use in Iran has surged since the beginning of the protests.

This is a story of how critical the Internet has become to life, even in authoritarian regimes — and how even, after 12 years of planning, Iran has been unable to consistently cut off access to the Internet outside the country.

A history of control

Kafinet — Internet cafés — emerged in Iran in the late 90s and early 2000s. Internet use became prolific. But in 2005, it began to change under the election of the conservative President Ahmadinejad. The idea of an “Iranian Internet” was proposed — one that was consistent with the policies and principles of the Iranian government, and able to be controlled and regulated domestically — as opposed to how the Internet operated overseas. From a technical perspective, the hope was an Iranian Internet would still be able to work inside the country, even if it was fully disconnected from the outside world. While the idea was discussed, no real work on it truly began until 2009, when the Green protests — a series of mass protests following the disputed reelection of President Ahmadinejad — caused the government to appreciate the potential risk that the Internet posed. It was around this time that ISPs needed approval from the government to operate, and were required to filter content in order to continue to gain that approval.

In 2013, Iran took things a step further, and began work on a National Infrastructure Network (NIN), with the aim of recreating within Iran all the essential Internet services like search and messaging that had traditionally been provided by organizations outside of Iran. It was coupled with policies that subsidized and encouraged the use of these local services; which, as they were hosted domestically, made monitoring and filtering much more feasible.

It was not quite as extreme as the Chinese approach to the Internet, where similar overseas services were banned altogether, but it was certainly a shift in that direction. And given the limited number of physical network connections from Iran to the outside world, it was much more feasible for the government to take the step of cutting off Internet outside the country — while allowing select infrastructure within it (such as banking and government services) to remain online.

Iran has deployed such tactics previously: most notably during protests in November 2019, triggered by an increase in fuel prices.

The initial response

Our earlier blog covered the initial response to the protests extensively.

To provide context (measured over the last week) four providers in Iran account for 85% of traffic in Iran: three mobile and one fixed/wireline.

As a baseline, the following traffic mix is what Cloudflare saw from these four major network providers in Iran the week before the protests started:

The protests began on September 16. You can see the government’s response in the Internet traffic, with a shutdown implemented that lasts the better part of a day:

However, the following days, it appears to return to a somewhat normal pattern.

What happened subsequently

Looking after that week, however, shows Internet usage picks up massively from the baseline as the protests spread across the country. Also of note: the “curfews” on the mobile networks that were implemented in that first week continued. You can see the troughs for all but the fixed Internet provider as traffic drops to near zero.

What traffic looks like now

Looking at a more recent week, two things stand out: the level of network activity across the major providers in Iran remains much higher than it was previously. Also, the curfews appear to have been lifted, with Internet traffic declining overnight, but not “flatlining” as it was in the graphs above.

The web persists, even in Iran

While the initial response of the Iranian government to the protests was to dramatically scale back access to the Internet, the government did not persist with the policy. Our hypothesis is that the Internet has become too important to economic activity and also everyday life for the country to be able to continue to operate without it. Despite having spent almost 10 years developing a NIN — an Iranian Internet — it appears that, in part because of the protests, traffic from the major Iranian networks to Cloudflare has picked up substantially, and the curfews have ceased.

While certain Internet properties continue to be blocked without access to a VPN — WhatsApp, for example — the idea that a country can simply disconnect itself from the Internet into a country-specific “splinternet” is being further and further tested. Even in a country like Iran, subject to sanctions and with a government-led policy of attempting to recreate core services within a country, access to the broader Internet is too important to simply shut off.

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-cloudflares-impact-week/

In the early days of Cloudflare, we made it a policy that every new hire had to interview with either me or my co-founder Michelle. It’s still the case today, though we now have more than 3,000 employees, continue to hire great people as we find them, and, because there are only so many hours in the day, have had to enlist a few more senior executives to help with these final calls.

At first, these calls were about helping screen for new members of our small team. But, as our team grew, the purpose of these calls changed. Today, by the time I do the final call with someone we’ve made the decision to hire them, so it’s rarely about screening. Instead, the primary purpose is to make sure everyone joining has had a positive conversation with a senior member of our team, so if in the future they ever see something going wrong they’ll hopefully feel a bit more comfortable letting one of us know. I think because of that these calls are some of the most important work I do.

But, for me, there’s another purpose. I get to hear first-hand why people chose to apply. That’s a barometer for what we’re doing right, evaluated by someone with a perspective outside the organization. And, nearly every day, I hear some version of the same thing: the most consistent reason new employees want to join Cloudflare is because of our mission and the breadth of our impact.

Our team wants the work they do to have a real, positive impact for the millions of users of our services and the billions of Internet users our decisions affect downstream. It makes me smile every time someone we’re about to extend an offer to says something along the lines of “when Cloudflare pushes a new feature or product, you’re changing the entire Internet for the better. And I want to be part of that.” That’s why I continue to be excited about my job too.

It may seem like our mission to “help build a better Internet” has been around forever, but it wasn’t something we had at the beginning. It developed as the natural outgrowth of the team we assembled and the products we built. Today, it’s integral to Cloudflare’s DNA. Our team has always been optimistic about the Internet and its potential to do good, especially if it is founded on respect for certain values like security, privacy, interoperability, and wide availability.

That’s why the focus on privacy over the past few years was always easy for us. We never sold customer data to marketers — that just didn’t seem like what would be a part of a better Internet — so when it came time to comply with new privacy laws, we didn’t have to pull back operations or cut off lines of revenue. Instead, we rolled out the use of Universal SSL to expand encryption broadly for the Internet, and we created our first consumer-facing product, a privacy-first DNS resolver.

As we kick off this year’s Impact Week, we certainly see a number of challenges for the Internet, though we think the opportunities for the Internet continue to far outweigh those challenges. Around the world, we see a number of countries rejecting the opportunity to maximize the potential of the Internet, and instead, passing new laws and regulations seeking to assert narrow control of the Internet for their own self-interested purposes, including in some cases for things like commercial advantage, censorship, or surveillance.

For example, around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’ve seen the Russian government launch cyberattacks and use targeted Internet outages to further torment the people in Ukraine, while at the same time pressing citizens in Russia to only use Internet tools and view information controlled by the Russian government.

Yet for all those challenges, we saw a disparate group of people and companies, including Cloudflare, come together to defend Ukraine from these attacks and do everything in their power to get the Internet back online as soon as possible. Nearly a year into the war, and despite the relentless efforts of a very powerful nation, the Internet remains a positive force for good in Ukraine, a way for them to get the message out about the horrific actions of the Russian government, and a tool for dissidents inside Russia to escape the attempted grip of censorship. When Russia personally sanctioned me earlier this year I took it as a badge of honor we were doing something right.

At the same time, the promise of the Internet continues to bring increased opportunity, especially in still developing parts of the world. Increased access to reliable and secure Internet in those countries will enable education, healthcare, and commerce in ways humanity has been struggling to advance for decades.

And we’ve seen recently in Iran that the Internet remains the leading tool for liberation for oppressed voices who seek to shake the control of authoritarian governments. This led to the somewhat unusual step by the US government of relaxing some of the sanctions against Iran in order to permit companies like Cloudflare greater freedom to ensure that the general population in Iran can have access to the Internet to support their cause.

Although issues like war, oppression, and misinformation are as old as humanity itself, the Internet is novel in its ability to bring together marginalized people who previously were unable to find and engage with each other based on distance, repression, or resources. To make sure the Internet fulfills that part of its promise, Project Galileo celebrated its 8th anniversary this year, and continues to support groups that unite underprivileged girls in India, the LGBTQIA+ community in the Nile River Valley, refugees needing health care services in a private environment. In total, through Project Galileo we provide Cloudflare’s services for free to more than 2,100 organizations in over 100 countries. That’s some of the work I’m the most proud of.

Over the course of this Impact Week, we will tell other stories about the way that the Internet, and Cloudflare specifically, provide an optimistic opportunity to improve our world. And that includes the entire world, especially as the Internet is poised to further close the gaps that have existed in Internet services to the developing world since its founding.

We will describe the way Cloudflare is focused on our own impact through emissions and the lessons we are applying to our products and operations to make sure that we are being responsible stewards of the Earth’s resources. We will review the ways that we are working to ensure that the necessary resources needed to benefit from the Internet aren’t limited to large companies with big budgets and the resources to buy the best tools.

From individuals and small businesses, to nonprofits and other community organizations, we want to make sure that the costs of cybersecurity and reliability don’t exclude those poised to benefit the most from the Internet. Specifically this year, we’re focused on making sure that sensitive groups — including local governments and critical infrastructure — are benefiting from new Zero Trust tools that are increasingly necessary for all organizations.

At the end of the week, we’ll release our annual Impact Report that provides a comprehensive review of our approach to these issues, especially when it comes to sustainability and ensuring that the Internet remains a widely-available and principled place.

We take pride in the principles that lie at the core of what we do as a company. Although many of us wake up every day scanning the Internet for the latest cyberattacks that we have to address or the latest congestion on the Internet to relieve, we are energized by the Internet’s ongoing promise to make life better for billions of people. This Impact Week we get to wake up and focus on those stories and share with you why all of us are here. We hope you are as excited as we are.