On November 18, Cloudflare experienced an outage that caused many top websites to go offline temporarily. Customers faced challenges as they attempted to pivot away from Cloudflare due to inaccessible services and DNS functionalities. Security experts highlighted this incident as a pivotal opportunity for organizations to reassess their web application firewall performances and other security measures. In particular, Aaron Turner emphasized the importance of understanding pre-existing vulnerabilities that Cloudflare had been mitigating, suggesting that this could prompt deeper internal analyses of security protocols.
The outage lasted for several hours, during which many customers might have unknowingly exposed their infrastructure to potential attacks. Experts warned that cybercriminals likely seized the opportunity to launch targeted attacks when organizations bypassed Cloudflare’s defenses. Nicole Scott from Replica Cyber described the outage as an unintentional stress test of security measures. Organizations should carefully analyze their system logs from that period to evaluate what protections were circumvented and for how long, as well as to measure true threats versus noise during the outage. Cloudflare confirmed that the incident was not caused by malicious activity, but rather a database permissions issue, emphasizing the fragility of dependence on single service providers for critical functions.
👉 Pročitaj original: Krebs on Security
