What time? What mitigations?
Cloudflare will proxy anything and then tell you "we're just a proxy, so we wont do anything lol" when you report anything other than cf pages. Doesn't matter if it's terror groups, animal torture, piracy, doxing, far right groups, etc.
I have personally submitted abuse reports and seen that absolutely nothing happens.
Oh and also the amount of abuse I see from people using Cloudflare Warp is also very high.
Cloudflare had the insight that the more DDoS-for-hire services there were out there, the greater the demand for their services. Offering free DDoS protection to DDoS-for-hire services helps keep customers coming back for more.
I mean, you don't need websites to advertise. Most DDoS-for-hire services back before 2009 advertised on IRC, NNTP, via ads in .NFO files found in warez releases found on Kazaa and BitTorrent, and so forth. (Some of the very tech-headed ones ones had Freenet sites.)
Kiwi Farms used their services for at least 6 years before anything happened.
More so than from "traditional" VPNs (i.e. the ones claiming to keep "no logs and never selling your data")?
That's quite surprising, since Cloudflare makes no such promises and markets Warp as a security/performance improvement tool, not an anonymity-providing one. I think at least for a while, Cloudflare-hosted sites would even bypass it entirely and they'd get the real underlying client IP.
Yes, because it is a free service, an easy and free way to just hide your ip address. You don't even need an account.
> I think at least for a while, Cloudflare-hosted sites would even bypass it entirely and they'd get the real underlying client IP.
Correct, this used to be the case, but no longer is as far as I can tell. But even with that, it was an issue for non-Cloudflare websites and services that are being attacked that aren't HTTP(S) (e.g. SSH)
Are they responsive at all to abuse notifications about their VPN users? Presumably the only thing they could even do is to block an upstream IP address, given that it doesn't require an account.
Cloudflare's policy is that if there's ToU-violating content being served through a Cloudflare-proxied domain, you can report it to request de-anonymization of the domain, so that you can then reach out to the actual host.
I've reported Cloudflare-proxied phishing-site clones of my company's website to Cloudflare, and they've usually come back to me with a pointer to the upstream-origin's ASN/ISP to reach out to within a few hours.
As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…
Only if the abuse happened through them. Perhaps they were just hosting holding pages, and the traffic was pushed elsewhere when active scams were running?
> surprises me, given the time and effort they spend mitigating fraud and abuse
They mitigate it incoming as one of their features for their customers. That doesn't mean they are going to mitigate it outgoing quite as fiercely. Though I'd assume they'd made some effort at least to maintain a reasonable reputation for their IP ranges.
If there's no abuse, nobody will pay their protection money.
Let's do Akamai, but cheaper. Trying to stop everything bad is impossible anyway.
Which is where the crackdown should happen.
Cloudflare will happily take money from and host (yes, host - they host, in spite of their rather stupid and completely disingenuous assertions that they don't) spammers and scammers. They do all the time, and they have no intention of changing that any time soon.
If you forward phishing spam to abuse@cloudflare.com, guess what? Nothing happens. You get an automated response, but they do nothing about it. They expect you to visit a web page that has all sorts of intentional problems (intentional because they've been pointed out to Cloudflare and Cloudflare hasn't addressed them for years) that make the process arduous and time consuming. For one, they don't have "spam" as an abuse type. For another, even though they now literally host web content, and even though they're a domain registrar, if you don't paste in a URL pointing to a site hosted by their proxying product, then you can't submit your form. This means there's literally no way to complain to Cloudflare about domains for which Cloudflare is in WHOIS and SOA records, and for whom Cloudflare hosts DNS. The fields are limited to some particular size (2,000 characters? I forget exactly), and have issues where if you paste more than a certain amount of content but less than the hard limit, you can't submit the form. If you try to use the form more than once a minute or two, IT'S RATE LIMITED and you can't submit the form. Imagine that - they need to protect themselves from human-speed abuse reporting.
In other words, it's REALLY hard to use their site to report abuse to them, and they know this, and it's intentional, unless we want to believe that they just suck at understanding how to make a web page that works.
If they get enough complaints about a given phishing domain, they eventually take action, but it'd be after several days, which is more than the lifetime of a typical phishing campaign. In essence Cloudflare is one of the most popular phishing and spam-promoted hosting platforms because of Cloudflare's intentional foot dragging and claims to want to "protect free speech".
They got on my shit list years ago when they told me - not kidding - that they couldn't just take down a Bank of America phishing site when it was pointed out to them because of "free speech". In other words, they don't want to set a precedent where they can apply the tiniest modicum of common sense and take down phishing sites which any reasonable human on the planet can unambiguously recognize as fraud.
Bottom line: Cloudflare tells the world that there's SO much bad stuff out there, and you'll get in trouble if you don't use their products, and that's mostly true if you want to run phishing and spam-promoted web sites, so scammers and spammers use Cloudflare and are protected from those of us who would report those spammers and scammers.
For all the companies and individuals who use Cloudflare, many are fooled in to thinking they need Cloudflare when they don't and are just making their sites problematic for much of the non-western world while helping a wanna-be monopoly re-centralize the Internet around a for-profit company that has a history of profiting from scammers and spammers.
If anyone thinks Cloudflare legitimately protects the Internet by mitigating fraud and abuse, I'd be very interested to see evidence that doesn't come from Cloudflare that shows this.
2) use literally any other registrar / DNS service / hosting platform. You then won't need to worry about whether people all over the world will be getting CAPTCHAs on ever visit because of where they live or what browser they choose to use.
I know this because I manage a WordPress site fronted by a different WAF, and I can see in the logs that malicious bots are trying to pwn the site basically 24/7.
(and before you say ‘patches’ – yes, but defense in depth is a thing, and you don’t always have the luxury of vendors with good security practices.)
However, if you really care about Wordpress security, a WAF is just covering things up, and yes, you need to patch (but that's not really the fix). The proper fix is to reconfigure things to not follow Wordpress' absolutely ridiculous security. While patching depends on vendors, securing Wordpress from its own hubris doesn't depend on vendors.
But even where Cloudflare's products are arguably good, they still do too much in my opinion to marginalize non-mainstream visitors and to re-centralize the Internet around one big company. Every time they have issues, huge parts of the Internet are affected. If I wanted a WAF, I'd get it from elsewhere.
Anyway, WP was just an example. Are you 100% certain that all your software is 100% on the ball when it comes to modern security practices? We all know that not everyone takes security seriously.
> Every time they have issues, huge parts of the Internet are affected. If I wanted a WAF, I'd get it from elsewhere.
Which ‘elsewhere’ would you suggest? Every time AWS, Azure or GCP have issues, the internet is affected too.