Over the past 24 hours, Cloudflare has observed HTTP DDoS attacks targeting university websites in Australia. Universities were the first of several groups publicly targeted by the pro-Russian hacker group Killnet and their affiliate AnonymousSudan, as revealed in a recent Telegram post. The threat actors called for additional attacks against 8 universities, 10 airports, and 8 hospital websites in Australia beginning on Tuesday, March 28.

Security Week 2023 is officially in the books. In our welcome post last Saturday, I talked about Cloudflare’s years-long evolution from protecting websites, to protecting applications, to protecting people. Our goal this week was to help our customers solve a broader range of problems, reduce external points of vulnerability, and make their jobs easier. We announced 34 new tools and integrations that will do just that.

Cloudflare offers many security features like WAF, Bot management, DDoS, Zero Trust, and more! This suite of products are offered in the form of rules to give basic protection against common vulnerability attacks. These rules are usually configured and monitored per domain, which is very simple when we talk about one, two, maybe three domains (or what we call in Cloudflare’s terms, “zones”).

We are thrilled to announce the full support of wildcard and multi-hostname application definitions in Cloudflare Access. Until now, Access had limitations that restricted it to a single hostname or a limited set of wildcards. Before diving into these new features let’s review Cloudflare Access and its previous limitations around application definition.

At the end of 2021 Cloudflare launched Security Center, a unified solution that brings together our suite of security products and unique Internet intelligence. It enables security teams to quickly identify potential security risks and threats to their organizations, map their attack surface and mitigate these risks with just a few clicks. While Security Center initially focused on application security, we are now adding crucial zero trust insights to further enhance its capabilities.

During every Innovation Week, Cloudflare looks at our network’s performance versus our competitors. In past weeks, we’ve focused on how much faster we are compared to reverse proxies like Akamai, or platforms that sell serverless compute that compares to our Supercloud, like Fastly and AWS. This week, we’d like to provide an update on how we compare to other reverse proxies as well as an update to our application services security product comparison against Zscaler and Netskope.