As DDoS attacks increase in power, Cloudflare expands its offerings

"It’s DDoS protection for any box, container or VM that connects to the internet," the company announced on Thurday. "Whether it runs email, file transfer or a custom protocol, it can now get the full benefits of Cloudflare."

As distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks keep setting records, one of the companies that sells protection against them is expanding its product line to cover more than just web servers.

Cloudflare announced a new product called Spectrum that will protect email, remote access, gaming services and more.

“It’s DDoS protection for any box, container or [virtual machine] that connects to the internet,” the San Francisco company announced Thursday. “Whether it runs email, file transfer or a custom protocol, it can now get the full benefits of Cloudflare.”

This year has already seen record-breaking denial-of-service attacks, with reports of as much as 1.7 terabits per second of junk web traffic hitting one U.S. company’s servers in early March, not long after a separate 1.35 Tbps attack.

Google made a similar move in the DDoS protection market last month announced a suite of new security products for Google Cloud and G Suite customers including Cloud Armor, which is based on the technology used to protect Google Search, Gmail and YouTube.

It’s an increasingly crowded and competitive business — and a lucrative one, too, given that the cloud sectors of companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are among the most profitable divisions of each tech giant.

Cloudflare’s Spectrum has already been deployed by gaming companies like Hypixel, which runs the world’s biggest Minecraft server and dealt with a terabit-per-second DDoS from the Mirai botnet.

“Hypixel was one of the first subjects of the Mirai botnet DDoS attacks and frequently receives large attacks. Before Spectrum, we had to rely on unstable services and techniques that increased latency, worsening user’s experience,” Bruce Blair, the CTO at Hypixel, said as Cloudflare announced the new product. “Now, we’re able to be continually protected without added latency, which makes it the best option for any latency and uptime sensitive service such as online gaming.”

In addition to DDoS protection, Spectrum offers TLS termination — a method of dividing certain kinds of incoming web traffic, to speed up performance — and it integrates with Cloudflare’s IP Firewall.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Technology

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

• The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure

• Election official says Tina Peters would be consultant, won’t have access to election systems