Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Cloudflare’s DDoS Threat Report. This edition covers DDoS trends and key findings for the fourth and final quarter of the year 2023, complete with a review of major trends throughout the year.

You may know Cloudflare as the company powering nearly 20% of the web. But powering and protecting websites and static content is only a fraction of what we do. In fact, well over half of the dynamic traffic on our network consists not of web pages, but of Application Programming Interface (API) traffic — the plumbing that makes technology work.

The challenge of telling humans and bots apart is almost as old as the web itself. From online ticket vendors to dating apps, to ecommerce and finance — there are many legitimate reasons why you'd want to know if it's a person or a machine knocking on the front door of your website. Unfortunately, the tools for the web have traditionally been clunky and sometimes involved a bad user experience.

Many applications rely on user data to deliver useful features. For instance, browser telemetry can identify network errors or buggy websites by collecting and aggregating data from individuals. However, browsing history can be sensitive, and sharing this information opens the door to privacy risks. Interestingly, these applications are often not interested in individual data points (e.g.

As the last school bell rings before winter break, one thing school districts should keep in mind is that during the winter break, schools can become particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks as the reduced staff presence and extended downtime create an environment conducive to security lapses. Criminal actors make their move when organizations are most vulnerable: on weekends and holiday breaks.

Two months ago, we made Cloudflare Turnstile generally available — giving website owners everywhere an easy way to fend off bots, without ever issuing a CAPTCHA. Turnstile allows any website owner to embed a frustration-free Cloudflare challenge on their website with a simple code snippet, making it easy to help ensure that only human traffic makes it through.

We are thrilled about Australia’s strategic direction to build a world-leading cyber nation by 2030. As a world-leading cybersecurity company whose mission is to help build a better Internet, we think we can help. Cloudflare empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost.