Cloudflare has mostly ditched third party security tools, suggests not trying that at home

Cloudflare has used AI to automate processing of incoming reports to its bug bounty program for $58 a month using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model and chose it partly because using the AI company’s security-specific Mythos model would burn through around $200,000 a month to do the same job. The company’s chief security officer ( …

[Bebu sa Ware]

With or For ?

> vendors will instead place forward-deployed engineers at their clients and charge them with “constantly making software that works for you.”

"Charge them for" seems more likely as "them" would normally refer to "their clients." (Comma after "them" perhaps.)

All C suite speak I suppose - chaining buzzwords ("forward-deployed") and slogans ("constantly making software that works for you") together in semilucid utterances.

I imagine what was meant was "vendors will instead deploy engineers at their clients' locations where they will continually create software that works for the client."

The original by using a slogan, gratuitously introduces an extraneous third party in the second person ("you") whereas also referring to the clients in the second person would be clearer and be in accord with the slogan. viz just substituting "at their clients" with "at your location" would be sufficient.

IT has always produced more bollocks than a prairie oyster farm but AI has caused a Spaffapocalyptic tsunami of codswallop.

[GoneFission]

Re: With or For ?

It's also kind of hilarious in that it evokes the image of a dedicated, highly motivated software engineer on-site building out tools and integrations just for your fancy, special, one-of-a-kind company as well as any other demands and ideas your suits can dream up. It's selling customers the closest thing to "getting Bill from Microsoft on the phone to fix this ASAP!!!".

In reality it's really just the same team of off-site over-allocated, under-resourced software developers who used to be able to work on new features and improvements in a semblance of peace, but now have to also spend hours upon hours answering phone calls and zero-notice meeting requests from every suit-wearing client that sales manages to rope into signing on the dotted line. Why pay for customer support or client relations if you can just tack it onto the developers' job description at no extra cost?

[MatthewSt]

Re: With or For ?

Charge: entrust (someone) with a task as a duty or responsibility

"Them" refers to the engineers. It's ambiguous, but not incorrect

[retiredFool]

I expect many will start poisoning the web

as a result of AI scraping. If an AI sees

for(i=0; i<10; i--)

{

do something even less clever

}

often enough, will it start mimicking it?

I also thought the line about how cloudflare is soo benevolent they went to the extra expense of ssl. I mean WTF, an extra micro-cent per connection? Possibly even a pico-cent. Yeah they love us.

[Blazde]

Re: I expect many will start poisoning the web

cloudflare is soo benevolent they went to the extra expense of ssl. I mean WTF, an extra micro-cent per connection? Possibly even a pico-cent. Yeah they love us.

They claim it was expensive because it cannibalised their product differentiation. It applied to all free accounts whereas previously SSL was a feature some customers were willing to pay more for.

But of course it was just a good forward-looking business strategy. An early recognition of what would quickly become be the norm, a differentiation compared to rivals, and a decision that underpinned their marketing for years afterwards, apparently still today. I would expect it made them a lot of money.

The marketing probably best illustrated by their lavalamp wall gimmik and similar entropy sources that play some small role in seeding SSL keys (that they stole from SGI - the original being a genuinely useful source of randomness, the current ones being fun and hopefully not harmful).

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

It is the apocolypse

AI has finally replaced McAfee ?

Surely a sign of the end time

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they could stop crapping on the internet by frequently blocking VPNs.

[Anonymous Coward]

It’s almost like they are offering it as a service….

[Kevin McMurtrie]

And if they could stop crapping on the Internet by being every criminal organization's favorite tool for protecting fake stores from consequences.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloudflare AaaS Annoyance as a Service

Cloudflare is run by Matthew Prince. He has an email address for clients, called [e-mail]

I emailed him. I told him that his security service he provides to a variety of internet shops is measurably reducing the Gross Revenue of any company that was somehow talked into believing

that this service is helpful. Any company that uses Cloudflare as a Security service should carefully determine their volume and size of transaction from BEFORE using Cloudflare AND from

AFTER starting to use Cloudflare. Of course Mr Cloudflare did not respond, ever. I still consider Cloudflare the winner in any contest about "How many false positives can I create per hour!"

Personally I believe that Cloudflare might diminish the number of sales made online for these businesses by 3% to 10%. This is based only on my one experience, relating to online shopping.

I told him that I tried to contact any business which could not be reached due to Cloudflare, and that I told these businesses to test these assumptions, by trying other security services, to see

whether the number of customer transactions went up up or down in statistically significant amounts.

I told him that he was behind the times, because 15 or 20 years ago ONLY HACKERS seemed to use VPNs, whereas today these are a mainstream method for both getting a layer of security,

and of course for streaming something one has subscribed to, but is not able to otherwise reach, simply because one might work, live and vacation in say, Europe, Japan, China, Middle East,

South America, Canada, Mexico. That should never be illegal, because one subscribed to something, for example as an American or British citizen, and therefore ought to be able to sign in,

sign on, listen to music, news or shows that are definitely available to people who are citizens of their own country.

So Cloudflare is annoying, because it puts up fences and walls where there should be none whatsoever! Cloudflare has a sort of "East German Stasi" mentality, were everyone is guilty and

is not provided any means to prove themselves innocent.

Especially Cloudflare\s false and lying total blocking, where they accuse me like this:

"The action you performed triggered the 'security solution'. There are several actions that could trigger this block,

including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data"

Of course, none of this applies, and the geniuses at Cloudflare do not explain WHAT WORD OR PHRASE could trigger something,

and certainly, I NEVER USE AN SQL COMMAND, because that search language is the most error prone

thing that any software guy ever produced, and certainly I do not create malformed data! ! !

What I do know that I clicked on a link on a webpage, named https://www.insuranceagentsnearyou/Bankers-Life-and-Casualty-Co/NC/Charlotte/etc...html

And that is a crime now, according to the not very smart algorithm of Cloudflare? They are a highly nervous lot, shooting first and answering no questions later!

I certainly cannot recommend Cloudflare Security to anyone, and I would never use it myself. They are making dummy solutions, cutting corners, jumping to conclusions where none are indicated!

This is not the only case, just one of the many I recorded, in case a class-action-lawsuit is getting started!

Thank you for reading