Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

AI Agents now act on the web for millions of people. To a Site, an Agent can take many forms. It may be indistinguishable from a human user carrying out a task, or it might look like one visitor carrying many Users. This removes the ability for the Site to recognize, serve, and hold accountable the user or users behind the Agent, and causes the Site to face the costs when something goes wrong.

You run security at your organization. It’s 7:00 am, and you’re having breakfast. You receive a ping: a new critical vulnerability has been disclosed. Your team scrambles to compare vendor advisories, read technical research, check which systems run the affected software, and answer familiar questions from the business: are we affected, and what are we doing about it? Another disclosure arrives before that work is finished.

On October 19, 2026, we learned about eMudhra’s eight shockingly weak keys: where eMudhra was trusted to pick a 115-digit number for their virtual combination lock protecting the Internet, they picked the number 4. Not even four digits, just the number 4. The other seven keys were similarly weak: 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230 and 237. The next day, we wrote a blog post on the immediate action we took to mitigate this leak, and what customers needed to do on their end to stay secure.

Welcome to the 26th edition of Cloudflare's DDoS Threat Report. This edition covers the third quarter of 2026 — July, August, and September — and returns the series to its quarterly cadence following the combined H1 2026 volume. The analysis is produced by Cloudforce One, Cloudflare's Threat Intelligence organization, providing a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network.

Today, Cloudflare is launching a post-quantum geographically restricted key manager in support of our Data Localization Suite (DLS) in closed beta. This new PQ GeoKey Manager is a cornerstone of Cloudflare’s data sovereignty solutions, making sure that a customer's decryption keys are only accessible in their chosen geography. GeoKey Manager implements this by wrapping each decryption key such that it can only be decrypted by Cloudflare servers that are located in the allowed geography.

Today, we are expanding our web application firewall (WAF) by adding two new capabilities: full transaction detections and response rules. Full transaction detections evaluate each HTTP request alongside its response to identify evidence of exploitation. It helps answer both "Does this request look malicious?" and "What happened when the application handled it?" Response rules can then block the origin’s response before it reaches the requester.

Today, Calif.io, Wiz, OpenAI and Quarkslab disclosed two vulnerabilities in PHP, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and known as php2shell. The vulnerabilities affect all web servers running PHP 5.4 or later and they may allow an attacker to cause denial of service, remote code execution, and data exposure when an application processes specially crafted HTTP traffic.

The recent disclosure of a major vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler pointed to a widespread weak point: a login page is an attack surface that can be used to compromise and access an application server. Indeed, the disclosures included an actively exploited flaw that allowed attackers to execute commands on affected gateways without signing in. As with any emergency patch, admins had to weigh cutting off or disrupting their users’ access with the risk of delaying a critical security update.

A driver’s license tells you who someone is and that they passed a driving test, not whether they’ll drive responsibly in the future. The same is true for bots: verifying who operates it creates accountability, but trust depends on what it does next. A known bot can still ignore website preferences, overwhelm origins, or evade controls. It’s not always malicious — often it’s just a misconfiguration or a bug.

Every secure web gateway on the market works the same way: traffic matches a condition. A terminal action fires. Allow, Block, Isolate, Log. This model has been the foundation of network security for nearly 30 years, and it handles the common case well. But it has a ceiling, and customers with complex environments hit that ceiling regularly.