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Application Security

Connect, protect, perform — without compromise.

One breach can cost billions. One outage can cost the quarter. One bot army can drain your inventory before you've finished your coffee. Cloudflare blocks the attacks before they reach your code — every layer, every request, every day.

$100K+/hour
revenue loss during downtime — DDoS attacks now peak at 5.6 Tbps, overwhelming traditional scrubbing before you can react
Hours vs. Weeks
attackers weaponize zero-days in hours (Log4Shell, MOVEit) — your patching cycle takes weeks, leaving a critical exposure window
Shadow endpoints
78% of orgs have undocumented APIs handling auth, payments, PII — attackers find them first, automate credential stuffing and exfiltration
explore the layers
DDoS Protection

When the flood comes, you're already behind the dam.

DDoS attacks don't ask permission. They show up in volume, at any layer, at any hour. Cloudflare's network absorbs them automatically — no rules to write, no pages to wake up to. Your origin keeps serving real users while the attack hits a wall it can't break.

Volumetric flood · absorbed at the edge illustrative · the wall doesn't move
attack volume hitting edge 5.6 Tbps
reaching your origin 0 bps
58x headroom
329 Tbps network capacity vs. 5.6 Tbps largest attack on record — autonomous mitigation in seconds, zero service degradation
Zero ops overhead
Always-on protection with no manual tuning, threshold configuration, or incident response required
Full-stack defense
Network (L3), transport (L4), and application (L7) layer protection — comprehensive coverage at every attack vector
Security Rules

Defense in depth — managed by Cloudflare, customized by you.

Layered defense · request → managed → custom → rate-limit → origin → data-scan
Actions per rule: block managed challenge log skip (custom rules)
Managed Rules · Signature-based

We write them. We update them. You stay protected.

Deterministic patterns — regex, string & structural matches — authored by Cloudflare and OWASP.

New signatures ship within hours of a CVE — the network is patched while teams are still triaging.

Zero-day CVEs (e.g. Log4Shell) Network-wide patch in minutes · industry avg: 60+ days to patch
Custom Rules · Your policy + ML signals

Your policy, applied at the edge.

Your expressions, your thresholds. Combine request fields (geo, path, headers) with Cloudflare-computed ML signals like the WAF Attack Score.

An ML model scores every request 1–99 based on how attack-shaped it looks — catching zero-days and disguised payloads that signatures miss.

You decide where to draw the line and what action to take.

🌍 Geo-block by country / ASN Compliance-ready · zero sanctioned-region traffic reaches origin
Rate Limiting Rules · Advanced

Count what matters. Stop abuse at the edge.

Count by anything: cookie, API key, JA3/JA4 fingerprint, ASN, JSON fields. Each key gets its own budget.

Count only what matters — 4xx-only for credential stuffing, or complexity-based so a GraphQL bomb costs more than a static asset.

🚪 5 logins/min per IP — block 10m Credential-stuffing fraud: $6B+/yr in e-commerce losses (Forrester)
Sensitive Data Detection

Stop the leak before it lands.

Scans response bodies (text, HTML, JSON, XML up to 1 MB) for PII, financial data, and secrets leaving your origin — including responses from cache and Workers.

Detection runs off the response path — zero added latency. Action is always log (the response has already been sent), so you get full visibility into what slipped through your code.

💳 Credit card numbers (PCI) PCI-DSS non-compliance: $5K–$100K/month in fines per merchant (Visa)
Zero engineering lift
Edge-enforced security with no code changes, SDK integration, or application server dependencies
Global in <60s
CVE patches deployed network-wide in under a minute — closing the exposure window before attackers exploit it
Unified control plane
Managed, custom, and rate-limiting rules configured from a single dashboard — no vendor sprawl
API Shield

>50% of Internet traffic are API calls — and that's where the breach starts.

APIs run your revenue: checkout, login, payments, partner integrations, mobile apps. They're also the shortest path to your data — machine-readable, often undocumented, and rarely covered by the same controls as your website. API Shield protects the surface your business actually runs on: it discovers every endpoint you have, validates every request that comes in, and stops sensitive data from leaking out — without a single change to your code.

Discover · Validate · Scan illustrative · request in, response out
API Discovery

Find what you didn't know you had.

🔍 Shadow APIs auto-catalogued Shadow & undocumented APIs are the #1 root cause of API breaches (OWASP API Top 10)
🔓 Flag publicly-exposed internal APIs Admin panels, debug endpoints, internal tools — discovered before they're exploited
Schema Validation

Reject what doesn't fit.

📐 Block requests that don't match your OpenAPI / GraphQL schema Stops Broken Object Property Authorization (OWASP API #3) — the spec you already have becomes an edge-enforced firewall
🚫 Block extra or missing fields Stops mass-assignment attacks · zero origin code changes
Sensitive Data Detection

Stop the leak before it lands.

💳 Credit card numbers (PCI) PCI-DSS non-compliance: $5K–$100K/month in fines per merchant (Visa)
🔑 API keys / secrets in responses Avg cost when secrets leak: $4.88M per incident (IBM 2024)
Edge-enforced
schema, auth, and rate checks run at the edge — zero changes to your app
Bring your spec
OpenAPI / GraphQL schemas you already have
Compliance
PCI · HIPAA · GDPR signal coverage out of the box
Bot Management

Every request gets a score. Then you decide who's human.

30–50% of internet traffic is automated. Cloudflare scores every request 1–99 across heuristics, machine learning, and behavioral signals — so you stop scrapers, credential-stuffers, and inventory-hoarders without breaking real users. Score in, action out.

The Bot Score illustrative · every request lands somewhere on 1–99
Bot Score

Every request, scored 1–99.

🎯 Heuristics + ML + Behavioral on every request Score lands in cf.bot_management.score — feed it into WAF rules, rate limits, transform rules, security events
⚙️ Not yes/no — a score you build rules around Block score=1, challenge 2–29, trust 30+. Tune the threshold per route without redeploying anything
Verified Bots

Allow the good ones. Block the impersonators.

Googlebot, Bingbot, payment partners pass through 15,000+ verified bot signatures, maintained by Cloudflare — your SEO and integrations don't break
🎭 Fake Googlebots get blocked UA spoofing is the oldest trick in scraping. Verified Bots checks reverse DNS, not just headers
JS / Behavioral Detections

Catch what static signals miss.

🧠 Browser fingerprinting + session behavior Catches headless browsers, residential-proxy farms, and ML-evasion bots that fake every static signal
🔬 JS Detection refines the ML score A lightweight challenge most humans never see — but bots can't pass without solving
30–50% of traffic
is automated. You're already paying for bots to hit your origin
Score, don't guess
Heuristics + ML + Behavioral on every request — score the threat before you act
No SDK. No code.
Signals in WAF rules, rate limits, transform rules — zero engineering lift
▸ There's more
Not every rule blocks. Some shape the traffic.
Beyond Security Rules, Cloudflare's Rules family redirects URLs, rewrites paths, modifies headers, sets cache, and runs edge snippets — no app deploy required.
The bottom line

Cyber security is a board-level conversation.
We keep it a quiet one.

One breach. One outage. One wave. The cost is real — and it shows up on the board's agenda. Cloudflare runs every layer of defense at the edge so the next attack stays a non-event, not a headline.

Layered at the edge
DDoS, WAF, Bot Management, API Shield, Edge Rules — all at the edge, zero code changes
Less stack, more security
every layer at the edge means no integration tax, no per-vendor licensing, no finger-pointing during incidents
Always learning
every attack on Cloudflare's network sharpens defenses for everyone — 215B blocked last quarter, all feeding the rules
1 dashboard
DDoS · WAF · Bot Management · API Shield · every layer in one place
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