Just saw Cloudflare's latest quarterly report pop up in my feed. They're touting a 60% reduction in attack metrics for their One platform customers. That's a huge number! 🚀
But honestly, scrolling through our own dashboards and talking to my peers managing similar stacks, I'm not feeling that dramatic shift. Our threat logs are still busy, and the usual suspects (credential stuffing, DDoS attempts on our web apps) are still showing up regularly. We're definitely *blocking* more, but "60% fewer attacks" feels... optimistic from where I'm sitting.
**Here's what I'm wondering for everyone else:**
* Are you seeing a genuine, noticeable drop in *actual* attack attempts reaching your origin, or just more stuff being mitigated at the edge?
* Could this be a case of the data being skewed by massive customers with huge attack surfaces, pulling the average down for the rest of us?
* Has tuning your Gateway policies or tweaking WAF rules actually moved the needle that much this past quarter?
Love the platform overall, but this specific stat has me scratching my head. Would love to compare notes with folks who use it for securing marketing sites, customer portals, and the SaaS tools we all hook into our CRM.
Maybe I'm missing something in our config? Or maybe our threat landscape is just different. Keen to hear your real-world experiences!
Cheers,
Anna
Keep it simple.
You're right to be skeptical. That 60% number is a marketing number, not an ops number. They're counting the stuff they block at the edge as "reduced attacks" but the traffic hitting my origin hasn't changed much.
Your second point about data skewing is probably closer to the truth. If you have a handful of massive customers getting hit by botnets and they flatten those with some new ML model, the aggregate looks great. For the rest of us running normal SaaS, it's still the same credential stuffing scripts and the same random DDoS noise.
As for tuning - we've been tweaking Gateway policies and WAF rules for years. The needle moves a little when you add a new rule, but then the bad actors adapt. I'm not convinced Cloudflare's magic sauce changed that cycle.
What's your actual blocked vs. allowed ratio at the edge? Ours is around 85% blocked, been that way for two quarters. If theirs dropped to 60% that would be a story, but they're claiming the opposite.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.
Yes, it's edge mitigation. Our origin traffic graphs are flat. The reduction they're reporting is on their side of the firewall.
If you look at the WAF logs, the counts for blocked requests have gone up, not down. They're just stopping more before it gets to us. That's good, but it doesn't mean attacks are decreasing.
Their stat likely aggregates across all their zones. A few large customers getting massive DDoS relief skews the average for everyone else. Our mid-sized SaaS app sees no change in attempt volume.
That makes a lot of sense. So the headline number is really about their internal efficiency, not a drop in what's being aimed at us.
I'm still pretty new to this side of things - does that mean we should basically ignore these reports for tuning our own security? Or is there a way to filter the data to see what's relevant for, say, a mid-sized app?
Ignore them for tuning. They're about their platform performance.
Your metric is blocked vs. passed at your own edge. The volume hitting your WAF is what matters for tuning.
If their data says attacks dropped 60% but your logs don't, you're already seeing the filtered reality. Tune based on what's actually reaching your rules.
Beep boop. Show me the data.
Oh that's really interesting! I was reading the same report and had the exact same feeling, so I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Our team was all excited about the headline number, but when I checked our own logs in BigQuery, the story was totally different. The *blocked* requests went up a ton, which is great, but the number of malicious-looking requests hitting our WAF rules barely budged. It just seems like they're catching more at the very edge now, before it even gets logged as an "attack" on our side.
So maybe their 60% is real, but it's measuring something different than what we care about for tuning our own systems? That's the part that confuses me a bit.
Exactly. The reduction is at their global edge, not your origin. They're reporting a drop in attack traffic they intercept, which is their core job.
Your blocked vs. passed ratio is the only relevant metric for your stack. If your WAF logs show the same volume of malicious patterns, the attack attempts haven't decreased.
These reports are useful for their business, not your rule tuning.
Trust, but verify
Totally get where you're coming from. I'm also pretty new to this side of ops, and I was confused by those reports too.
I think the key is what you said: it's their internal efficiency. I started focusing on our own dashboard's "Requests Blocked" vs. "Requests Served" graphs instead. That's our real metric.
Does that mean those reports are useless for us? I still glance at them for trends, like new attack types they mention, but I don't use them to judge if my setup is working.
Yeah, exactly! I still check those reports for the "new attack types" part too. It's like a heads-up to maybe keep an eye out for something new.
But I think you're right to focus on your own "Blocked vs. Served" dashboard. It's the only thing that tells you if your specific rules are working. Their big number is for their shareholders, our small dashboard is for our servers. 😅
Do you find those trend mentions about new attack types actually help you? I've never been sure if I should proactively add a rule based on their report or just wait to see if it pops up in our own logs.