Tag Archives: Magic Transit

Introducing Magic Firewall

Post Syndicated from Achiel van der Mandele original https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-magic-firewall/

Introducing Magic Firewall

Introducing Magic Firewall

Today we’re excited to announce Magic Firewall™, a network-level firewall delivered through Cloudflare to secure your enterprise. Magic Firewall covers your remote users, branch offices, data centers and cloud infrastructure. Best of all, it’s deeply integrated with Cloudflare One™, giving you a one-stop overview of everything that’s happening on your network.

Cloudflare Magic Transit™ secures IP subnets with the same DDoS protection technology that we built to keep our own global network secure. That helps ensure your network is safe from attack and available and it replaces physical appliances that have limits with Cloudflare’s network.

That still leaves some hardware onsite, though, for a different function: firewalls. Networks don’t just need protection from DDoS attacks; administrators need a way to set policies for all traffic entering and leaving the network. With Magic Firewall, we want to help your team deprecate those network firewall appliances and move that burden to the Cloudflare global network.

Firewall boxes are miserable to manage

Network firewalls have always been clunky. Not only are they expensive, they are bound by their own hardware constraints. If you need more CPU or memory, you have to buy more boxes. If you lack capacity, the entire network suffers, directly impacting employees that are trying to do their work. To compensate, network operators and security teams are forced to buy more capacity than we need, resulting in having to pay more than necessary.

We’ve heard this problem from our Magic Transit customers who are constantly running into capacity challenges:

“We’re constantly running out of memory and running into connection limits on our firewalls. It’s a huge problem.”

Network operators find themselves piecing together solutions from different vendors, mixing and matching features, and worrying about keeping policies in sync across the network. The result is more headache and added cost.

The solution isn’t more hardware

Some organizations then turn to even more vendors and purchase additional hardware to manage the patchwork firewall hardware they have deployed. Teams then have to balance refresh cycles, updates, and end of life management across even more platforms. These are band-aid solutions that do not solve the fundamental problem: how do we create a single view of the entire network that gives insights into what is happening (good and bad) and apply policy instantaneously, globally?

Introducing Magic Firewall
Traditional Firewall Architecture

Introducing Magic Firewall

Instead of more band-aids, we’re excited to launch Magic Firewall as a single, comprehensive, solution to network filtering. Unlike legacy appliances, Magic Firewall runs in the Cloudflare network. That network scales up or down with a customer’s needs at any given time.

Running in our network delivers an added benefit. Many customers backhaul network traffic to single chokepoints in order to perform firewalling operations, adding latency. Cloudflare operates data centers in 200 cities around the world and each of those points of presence is capable of delivering the same solution. Regional offices and data centers can instead rely on a Cloudflare Magic Firewall engine running within 100 milliseconds of their operation.

Integrated with Cloudflare One

Cloudflare One consists of products that allow you to apply a single filtering engine with consistent security controls to your entire network, not just part of it. The same types of controls that your organization wants to apply to traffic leaving your networks should be applied to traffic leaving your devices.

Magic Firewall will integrate with what you’re already using in Cloudflare. For example, traffic leaving endpoints outside of the network can reach Cloudflare using the Cloudflare WARP client where Gateway will apply the same rules your team configures for network level filtering. Branch offices and data centers can connect through Magic Transit with the same set of rules. This gives you a one-stop overview of your entire network instead of having to hunt down information across multiple devices and vendors.

How does it work?

So what is Magic Firewall? Magic Firewall is a way to replace your antiquated on-premises network firewall with an as-a-service solution, pushing your perimeter out to the edge. We already allow you to apply firewall rules at our edge with Magic Transit, but the process to add or change rules has previously involved working with your account team or Cloudflare support. Our first version, generally available in the next few months, will allow all our Magic Transit customers to apply static OSI Layer 3 & 4 mitigations completely self-service, at Cloudflare scale.

Introducing Magic Firewall Introducing Magic Firewall
Cloudflare applies firewall policies at every data center Meaning you have firewalls applying policies across the globe

Our first version of Magic Firewall will focus on static mitigations, allowing you to set a standard set of rules that apply to your entire network, whether devices or applications are sitting in the cloud, an employee’s device or a branch office. You’ll be able to express rules allowing or blocking based on:

  • Protocol
  • Source or destination IP and port
  • Packet length
  • Bit field match

Rules can be crafted in Wireshark syntax, a domain specific language common in the networking world and the same syntax we use across our other products. With this syntax, you can easily craft extremely powerful rules to precisely allow or deny any traffic in or out of your network. If you suspect there’s a bad actor inside or outside of your perimeter, simply log on to the dashboard and block that traffic. Rules are pushed out globally in seconds, shutting down threats at the edge.

Introducing Magic Firewall

Configuring firewalls should be easy and powerful. With Magic Firewall, rules can be configured using an easy UI that allows for complex logic. Or, just type the filter rule manually using Wireshark filter syntax and configure that way. Don’t want to mess with a UI? Rules can be added just as easily through the API.

What’s next?

Looking at packets is not enough… Even with firewall rules, teams still need visibility into what’s actually happening on their network: what’s happening inside of these datastreams? Is this legitimate traffic or do we have malicious actors either inside or outside of our network doing nefarious things? Deploying Cloudflare to sit between any two actors that interact with any of your assets (be they employee devices or services exposed to the Internet) allows us to enforce any policy, anywhere, either on where the traffic is coming from or what’s inside the traffic. Applying policies based on traffic type is just around the corner and we’re excited to announce that we’re planning to add additional capabilities to automatically detect intrusion events based on what’s happening inside datastreams in the near future.

We’re excited about this new journey. With Cloudflare One, we’re reinventing what the network looks like for corporations. We integrate access management, security features and performance across the board: for your network’s visitors but also for anyone inside it. All of this built on top of a network that was #BuiltForThis.

We’ll be opening up Magic Firewall in a limited beta, starting with existing Magic Transit customers. If you’re interested, please let us know.

What is Cloudflare One?

Post Syndicated from Rustam Lalkaka original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/

What is Cloudflare One?

Running a secure enterprise network is really difficult. Employees spread all over the world work from home. Applications are run from data centers, hosted in public cloud, and delivered as services. Persistent and motivated attackers exploit any vulnerability.

Enterprises used to build networks that resembled a castle-and-moat. The walls and moat kept attackers out and data in. Team members entered over a drawbridge and tended to stay inside the walls. Trust folks on the inside of the castle to do the right thing, and deploy whatever you need in the relative tranquility of your secure network perimeter.

The Internet, SaaS, and “the cloud” threw a wrench in that plan. Today, more of the workloads in a modern enterprise run outside the castle than inside. So why are enterprises still spending money building more complicated and more ineffective moats?

Today, we’re excited to share Cloudflare One™, our vision to tackle the intractable job of corporate security and networking.

What is Cloudflare One?

Cloudflare One combines networking products that enable employees to do their best work, no matter where they are, with consistent security controls deployed globally.

Starting today, you can begin replacing traffic backhauls to security appliances with Cloudflare WARP and Gateway to filter outbound Internet traffic. For your office networks, we plan to bring next-generation firewall capabilities to Magic Transit with Magic Firewall to let you get rid of your top-of-shelf firewall appliances.

With multiple on-ramps to the Internet through Cloudflare, and the elimination of backhauled traffic, we plan to make it simple and cost-effective to manage that routing compared to MPLS and SD-WAN models. Cloudflare Magic WAN will provide a control plane for how your traffic routes through our network.

You can use Cloudflare One today to replace the other function of your VPN: putting users on a private network for access control. Cloudflare Access delivers Zero Trust controls that can replace private network security models. Later this week, we’ll announce how you can extend Access to any application – including SaaS applications. We’ll also preview our browser isolation technology to keep the endpoints that connect to those applications safe from malware.

Finally, the products in Cloudflare One focus on giving your team the logs and tools to both understand and then remediate issues. As part of our Gateway filtering launch this week we’re including logs that provide visibility into the traffic leaving your organization. We’ll be sharing how those logs get smarter later this week with a new Intrusion Detection System that detects and stops intrusion attempts.

What is Cloudflare One?

Many of those components are available today, some new features are arriving this week, and other pieces will be launching soon. All together, we’re excited to share this vision and for the future of the corporate network.

Problems in enterprise networking and security

The demands placed on a corporate network have changed dramatically. IT has gone from a back-office function to mission critical. In parallel with networks becoming more integral, users spread out from offices to work from home. Applications left the datacenter and are now being run out of multiple clouds or are being delivered by vendors directly over the Internet.

Direct network paths became hairpin turns

Employees sitting inside of an office could connect over a private network to applications running in a datacenter nearby. When team members left the office, they could use a VPN to sneak back onto the network from outside the walls. Branch offices hopped on that same network over expensive MPLS links.

When applications left the data center and users left their offices, organizations responded by trying to force that scattered world into the same castle-and-moat model. Companies purchased more VPN licenses and replaced MPLS links with difficult SD-WAN deployments. Networks became more complex in an attempt to mimic an older model of networking when in reality the Internet had become the new corporate network.

Defense-in-depth splintered

Attackers looking to compromise corporate networks have a multitude of tools at their disposal, and may execute surgical malware strikes, throw a volumetric kitchen sink at your network, or any number of things in between. Traditionally, defense against each class of attack was provided by a separate, specialized piece of hardware running in a datacenter.

Security controls used to be relatively easy when every user and every application sat in the same place. When employees left offices and workloads left data centers, the same security controls struggled to follow. Companies deployed a patchwork of point solutions, attempting to rebuild their topside firewall appliances across hybrid and dynamic environments.

High-visibility required high-effort

The move to a patchwork model sacrificed more than just defense-in-depth — companies lost visibility into what was happening in their networks and applications. We hear from customers that this capture and standardization of logs has become one of their biggest hurdles. They purchased expensive data ingestion, analysis, storage, and analytics tools.

Enterprises now rely on multiple point solutions that one of the biggest hurdles is the capture and standardization of logs. Increasing regulatory and compliance pressures place more emphasis on data retention and analysis. Splintered security solutions become a data management nightmare.

Fixing issues relied on best guesses

Without visibility into this new networking model, security teams had to guess at what could go wrong. Organizations who wanted to adopt an “assume breach” model struggled to determine what kind of breach could even occur, so they threw every possible solution at the problem.

We talk to enterprises who purchase new scanning and filtering services, delivered in virtual appliances, for problems they are unsure they have. These teams attempt to remediate every possible event manually, because they lack visibility, rather than targeting specific events and adapting the security model.

How does Cloudflare One fit?

Over the last several years, we’ve been assembling the components of Cloudflare One. We launched individual products to target some of these problems one-at-a-time. We’re excited to share our vision for how they all fit together in Cloudflare One.

Flexible data planes

Cloudflare launched as a reverse proxy. Customers put their Internet-facing properties on our network and their audience connected to those specific destinations through our network. Cloudflare One represents years of launches that allow our network to process any type of traffic flowing in either the “reverse” or “forward” direction.

In 2019, we launched Cloudflare WARP — a mobile application that kept Internet-bound traffic private with an encrypted connection to our network while also making it faster and more reliable. We’re now packaging that same technology into an enterprise version launching this week to connect roaming employees to Cloudflare Gateway.

Your data centers and offices should have the same advantage. We launched Magic Transit last year to secure your networks from IP-layer attacks. Our initial focus with Magic Transit has been delivering best-in-class DDoS mitigation to on-prem networks. DDoS attacks are a persistent thorn in network operators’ sides, and Magic Transit effectively diffuses their sting without forcing performance compromises. That rock-solid DDoS mitigation is the perfect platform on which to build higher level security functions that apply to the same traffic already flowing across our network.

Earlier this year, we expanded that model when we launched Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) to allow our customers to interconnect branch offices and data centers directly with Cloudflare. As part of Cloudflare One, we’ll apply outbound filtering to that same connection.

Cloudflare One should not just help your team move to the Internet as a corporate network, it should be faster than the Internet. Our network is carrier-agnostic, exceptionally well-connected and peered, and delivers the same set of services globally. In each of these on-ramps, we’re adding smarter routing based on our Argo Smart Routing technology, which has been shown to reduce latency by 30% or more in the real-world. Security + Performance, because they’re better together.

A single, unified control plane

When users connect to the Internet from branch offices and devices, they skip the firewall appliances that used to live in headquarters altogether. To keep pace, enterprises need a way to secure traffic that no longer lives entirely within their own network. Cloudflare One applies standard security controls to all traffic – regardless of how that connection starts or where in the network stack it lives.

Cloudflare Access starts by introducing identity into Cloudflare’s network. Teams apply filters based on identity and context to both inbound and outbound connections. Every login, request, and response proxies through Cloudflare’s network regardless of the location of the server or user. The scale of our network and its distribution can filter and log enterprise traffic without compromising performance.

Cloudflare Gateway keeps connections to the rest of the Internet safe. Gateway inspects traffic leaving devices and networks for threats and data loss events that hide inside of connections at the application layer. Launching soon, Gateway will bring that same level of control lower in the stack to the transport layer.

You should have the same level of control over how your networks send traffic. We’re excited to announce Magic Firewall, a next-generation firewall for all traffic leaving your offices and data centers. With Gateway and Magic Firewall, you can build a rule once and run it everywhere, or tailor rules to specific use cases in a single control plane.

We know some attacks can’t be filtered because they launch before filters can be built to stop them. Cloudflare Browser, our isolated browser technology gives your team a bulletproof pane of glass from threats that can evade known filters. Later this week, we’ll invite customers to sign up to join the beta to browse the Internet on Cloudflare’s edge without the risk of code leaping out of the browser to infect an endpoint.

Finally, the PKI infrastructure that secures your network should be modern and simpler to manage. We heard from customers who described certificate management as one of the core problems of moving to a better model of security. Cloudflare works with, not against, modern encryption standards like TLS 1.3. Cloudflare made it easy to add encryption to your sites on the Internet with one click. We’re going to bring that ease-of-management to the network functions you run on Cloudflare One.

One place to get your logs, one location for all of your security analysis

Cloudflare’s network serves 18 million HTTP requests per second on average. We’ve built logging pipelines that make it possible for some of the largest Internet properties in the world to capture and analyze their logs at scale. Cloudflare One builds on that same capability.

Cloudflare Access and Gateway capture every request, inbound or outbound, without any server-side code changes or advanced client-side configuration. Your team can export those logs to the SIEM provider of your choice with our Cloudflare Logpush service – the same pipeline that exports HTTP request events at scale for public sites. Magic Transit expands that logging capability to entire networks and offices to ensure you never lose visibility from any location.

We’re going beyond just logging events. Available today for your websites, Cloudflare Web Analytics converts logs into insights. We plan to keep expanding that visibility into how your network operates, as well. Just as Cloudflare has replaced the “band-aid boxes” that performed disparate network functions and unified them into a cohesive, adaptable edge, we intend to do the same for the fragmented, hard to use, and expensive security analytics ecosystem. More to come on this soon.Smarter, faster remediation

Data and analytics should surface events that a team can remediate. Log systems that lead to one-click fixes can be powerful tools, but we want to make that remediation automatic.

Launching into a closed preview later this week, Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System (IDS) will proactively scan your network for anomalous events and recommend actions or, better yet, take actions for you to remediate problems. We plan to bring that same proactive scanning and remediation approach to Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway.

Run your network on our globally scaled network

Over 25 million Internet properties rely on Cloudflare’s network to reach their audiences. More than 10% of all websites connect through our reverse proxy, including 16% of the Fortune 1000. Cloudflare accelerates traffic for huge chunks of the Internet by delivering services from datacenters around the world.

We deliver Cloudflare One from those same data centers. And critically, every datacenter we operate delivers the same set of services, whether that is Cloudflare Access, WARP, Magic Transit, or our WAF. As an example, when your employees connect through Cloudflare WARP to one of our data centers, there is a real chance they never have to leave our network or that data center to reach the site or data they need. As a result, their entire Internet experience becomes extraordinarily fast, no matter where they are in the world.

We expect that performance bonus to become even more meaningful as browsing moves to Cloudflare’s edge with Cloudflare Browser. The isolated browsers running in Cloudflare’s data centers can request content that sits just centimeters away. Even further, as more web properties rely on Cloudflare Workers to power their applications, entire workflows can stay inside of a data center within 100 ms of your employees.

What’s next?

While many of these features are available today, we’re going to be launching several new features over the next several days as part of Cloudflare’s Zero Trust week. Stay tuned for announcements each day this week that add new pieces to the Cloudflare One featureset.

What is Cloudflare One?

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

Post Syndicated from Omer Yoachimik original https://blog.cloudflare.com/moobot-vs-gatebot-cloudflare-automatically-blocks-botnet-ddos-attack-topping-at-654-gbps/

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

On July 3, Cloudflare’s global DDoS protection system, Gatebot, automatically detected and mitigated a UDP-based DDoS attack that peaked at 654 Gbps. The attack was part of a ten-day multi-vector DDoS campaign targeting a Magic Transit customer and was mitigated without any human intervention. The DDoS campaign is believed to have been generated by Moobot, a Mirai-based botnet. No downtime, service degradation, or false positives were reported by the customer.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Moobot Targets 654 Gbps towards a Magic Transit Customer

Over those ten days, our systems automatically detected and mitigated over 5,000 DDoS attacks against this one customer, mainly UDP floods, SYN floods, ACK floods, and GRE floods. The largest DDoS attack was a UDP flood and lasted a mere 2 minutes. This attack targeted only one IP address but hit multiple ports. The attack originated from 18,705 unique IP addresses, each believed to be a Moobot-infected IoT device.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Attack Distribution by Country – From 100 countries

The attack was observed in Cloudflare’s data centers in 100 countries around the world. Approximately 89% of the attack traffic originated from just 10 countries with the US leading at 41%, followed by South Korea and Japan in second place (12% each), and India in third (10%). What this likely means is that the malware has infected at least 18,705 devices in 100 countries around the world.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Attack Distribution by Country – Top 10

Moobot – Self Propagating Malware

‘Moobot’ sounds like a cute name, but there’s nothing cute about it. According to Netlab 360, Moobot is the codename of a self-propagating Mirai-based malware first discovered in 2019. It infects IoT (Internet of Things) devices using remotely exploitable vulnerabilities or weak default passwords. IoT is a term used to describe smart devices such as security hubs and cameras, smart TVs, smart speakers, smart lights, sensors, and even refrigerators that are connected to the Internet.

Once a device is infected by Moobot, control of the device is transferred to the operator of the command and control (C2) server, who can issue commands remotely such as attacking a target and locating additional vulnerable IoT devices to infect (self-propagation).

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps

Moobot is a Mirai-based botnet, and has similar capabilities (modules) as Mirai:

  1. Self-propagation – The self-propagation module is in charge of the botnet’s growth. After an IoT device is infected, it randomly scans the Internet for open telnet ports and reports back to the C2 server. Once the C2 server gains knowledge of open telnet ports around the world, it tries to leverage known vulnerabilities or brute force its way into the IoT devices with common or default credentials.
Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Self-propagation
  1. Synchronized attacks – The C2 server orchestrates a coordinated flood of packets or HTTP requests with the goal of creating a denial of service event for the target’s website or service.
Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Synchronized attacks

The botnet operator may use multiple C2 servers in various locations around the world in order to reduce the risk of exposure. Infected devices may be assigned to different C2 servers varying by region and module; one server for self-propagation and another for launching attacks. Thus if a C2 server is compromised and taken down by law enforcement authorities, only parts of the botnet are deactivated.

Why this attack was not successful

This is the second large scale attack in the past few months that we observed on Cloudflare’s network. The previous one peaked at 754M packets per second and attempted to take down our routers with a high packet rate. Despite the high packet rate, the 754Mpps attack peaked at a mere 253 Gbps.

As opposed to the high packet rate attack, this attack was a high bit rate attack, peaking at 654 Gbps. Due to the high bit rates of this attack, it seems as though the attacker tried (and failed) to cause a denial of service event by saturating our Internet link capacity. So let’s explore why this attack was not successful.

Cloudflare’s global network capacity is over 42 Tbps and growing. Our network spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries, including 17 cities in mainland China. It interconnects with over 8,800 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services, and enterprises. This level of interconnectivity along with the use of Anycast ensures that our network can easily absorb even the largest attacks.

Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
The Cloudflare Network

After traffic arrives at an edge data center, it is then load-balanced efficiently using our own Layer 4 load-balancer that we built, Unimog, which uses our appliances’ health and other metrics to load-balance traffic intelligently within a data center to avoid overwhelming any single server.

Besides the use of Anycast for inter-data center load balancing and Unimog for intra-data center load balancing, we also utilize various forms of traffic engineering in order to deal with sudden changes in traffic loads across our network. We utilize both automatic and manual traffic engineering methods that can be employed by our 24/7/365 Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team.

These combined factors significantly reduce the likelihood of a denial of service event due to link saturation or appliances being overwhelmed — and as seen in this attack, no link saturation occurred.

Detecting & Mitigating DDoS attacks

Once traffic arrives at our edge, it encounters our three software-defined DDoS protection systems:

  1. Gatebot – Cloudflare’s centralized DDoS protection systems for detecting and mitigating globally distributed volumetric DDoS attacks. Gatebot runs in our network’s core data center. It receives samples from every one of our edge data centers, analyzes them, and automatically sends mitigation instructions when attacks are detected. Gatebot is also synchronized to each of our customers’ web servers to identify its health and triggers mitigation accordingly.
  2. dosd (denial of service daemon) – Cloudflare’s decentralized DDoS protection systems. dosd runs autonomously in each server in every Cloudflare data center around the world, analyzing traffic and applying local mitigation rules when needed. Besides being able to detect and mitigate attacks at super-fast speeds, dosd significantly improves our network resilience by delegating the detection and mitigation capabilities to the edge.
  3. flowtrackd (flow tracking daemon) – Cloudflare’s TCP state tracking machine for detecting and mitigating the most randomized and sophisticated TCP-based DDoS attacks in unidirectional routing topologies (such as the case for Magic Transit). flowtrackd is able to identify the state of a TCP connection and then drops, challenges, or rate-limits packets that don’t belong to a legitimate connection.
Moobot vs. Gatebot: Cloudflare Automatically Blocks Botnet DDoS Attack Topping At 654 Gbps
Cloudflare DDoS Protection Lifecycle

The three DDoS protection systems collect traffic samples in order to detect DDoS attacks. The types of traffic data that they sample include:

  1. Packet fields such as the source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port, protocol, TCP flags, sequence number, options, and packet rate.
  2. HTTP request metadata such as HTTP headers, user agent, query-string, path, host, HTTP method, HTTP version, TLS cipher version, and request rate.
  3. HTTP response metrics such as error codes returned by customers’ origin servers and their rates.

Our systems then crunch these sample data points together to form a real-time view of our network’s security posture and our customer’s origin server health. They look for attack patterns and traffic anomalies. When found, a mitigation rule with a dynamically crafted attack signature is generated in real-time. Rules are propagated to the most optimal place for cost-effective mitigation. For example, an L7 HTTP flood might be dropped at L4 to reduce the CPU consumption.

Rules that are generated by dosd and flowtrackd are propagated within a single data center for rapid mitigation. Gatebot’s rules are propagated to all of the edge data centers which then take priority over dosd’s rules for an even and optimal mitigation. Even if the attack is detected in a subset of edge data centers, Gatebot propagates the mitigation instructions to all of Cloudflare’s edge data centers — effectively sharing the threat intelligence across our network as a form of proactive protection.

In the case of this attack, in each edge data center, dosd generated rules to mitigate the attack promptly. Then as Gatebot received and analyzed samples from the edge, it determined that this was a globally distributed attack. Gatebot propagated unified mitigation instructions to the edge, which prepared each and every one of our 200+ data centers to tackle the attack as the attack traffic may shift to a different data center due to Anycast or traffic engineering.

No inflated bills

DDoS attacks obviously pose the risk of an outage and service disruption. But there is another risk to consider — the cost of mitigation. During these ten days, more than 65 Terabytes of attack traffic were generated by the botnet. However, as part of Cloudflare’s unmetered DDoS protection guarantee, Cloudflare mitigated and absorbed the attack traffic without billing the customer. The customer doesn’t need to submit a retroactive credit request. Attack traffic is automatically excluded from our billing system. We eliminated the financial risk.