Posts tagged with security
Why it matters: Cloudflare is scaling its abuse mitigation by integrating AI and real-time APIs. For engineers, this demonstrates how to handle high-volume legal and security compliance through automation and service-specific policies while maintaining network performance and reliability.
- •Cloudflare's H1 2025 transparency report highlights a significant increase in automated abuse detection and response capabilities.
- •The company is utilizing AI and machine learning to identify sophisticated patterns in unauthorized streaming and phishing campaigns.
- •A new API-driven reporting system for rightsholders has scaled DMCA processing, increasing actions from 1,000 to 54,000 in six months.
- •Cloudflare applies service-specific abuse policies, distinguishing between hosted content and CDN/security services.
- •Technical measures prevent the misconfiguration of free-tier plans for high-bandwidth video streaming to protect network resources.
- •Collaborative data sharing with rightsholders enables real-time identification and mitigation of domains involved in streaming abuse.
Why it matters: These updates provide engineers with a unified framework for building, governing, and scaling AI agents. By integrating advanced models like Claude and streamlining data retrieval via Foundry IQ, Microsoft is reducing the complexity of deploying enterprise-grade agentic workflows.
- •Azure Copilot introduces specialized agents to the portal and CLI to automate cloud migration, assessment, and governance tasks.
- •Foundry Control Plane enters public preview, offering centralized security, lifecycle management, and observability for AI agents.
- •Foundry IQ and Fabric IQ provide unified endpoints for RAG solutions and real-time analytics grounded in enterprise data.
- •The Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan (P3) simplifies AI procurement by providing a single fund for 32 Microsoft services.
- •Anthropic Claude models are now available in Microsoft Foundry, enabling advanced reasoning within a unified governance framework.
- •Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL has entered private preview to expand database options for cloud-native applications.
Why it matters: This article demonstrates how Meta leverages secure-by-default mobile frameworks and AI to proactively embed security into development workflows. It's crucial for engineers to understand how to balance security with developer velocity and how AI can scale these efforts.
- •Meta implements secure-by-default mobile frameworks to wrap potentially unsafe OS and third-party functions, ensuring security while maintaining developer speed.
- •These frameworks are designed to closely mimic existing APIs, utilize public interfaces, and reduce complexity to maximize developer adoption.
- •Generative AI and automation significantly accelerate the large-scale adoption of these secure frameworks, enabling consistent security enforcement and efficient code migration.
- •Key design principles include API resemblance to reduce cognitive burden, reliance on stable public APIs, and broad applicability across applications.
- •SecureLinkLauncher (SLL) for Android is an example, preventing intent hijacking by wrapping native intent launching methods with robust security checks.
Why it matters: This review offers critical insights into evolving Internet trends, including AI's impact on web traffic, the rise of post-quantum security, and network performance, essential for engineers building and securing online services.
- •Global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with Starlink traffic doubling and Googlebot leading verified bot activity for search and AI training.
- •Post-quantum encrypted web traffic reached 52% of human-generated requests, highlighting a significant shift in security adoption.
- •AI-related crawling surged, with Googlebot's dual-purpose crawls dominating and "user action" crawling increasing 15x. AI bots were also frequently blocked via robots.txt.
- •Meta's llama-3-8b-instruct was the most popular model on Workers AI, primarily used for text generation tasks.
- •Mobile traffic saw iOS devices account for 35% globally, while HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 adoption continued to rise.
Why it matters: This critical RCE in React Server Components allows unauthenticated code execution. Engineers must patch immediately and apply WAF rules to protect against active exploitation and prevent severe security breaches.
- •React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) is a critical RCE vulnerability (CVSS 10.0) in React Server Components (RSC) Flight protocol.
- •The flaw stems from unsafe deserialization, enabling unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary privileged JavaScript with a single crafted HTTP request.
- •Cloudflare observed immediate, widespread scanning and exploitation attempts by threat actors within hours of public disclosure.
- •Threat actors leverage vulnerability scanners (e.g., Nuclei), asset discovery platforms, and tools like Burp Suite for reconnaissance and exploitation.
- •Two other RSC vulnerabilities, CVE-2025-55183 (Server Function leaking) and CVE-2025-55184 (DoS), were also disclosed.
- •Cloudflare deployed WAF rules to mitigate these threats, available to all customers.
Why it matters: This move provides a stable, open-source foundation for AI agent development, standardizing how LLMs securely interact with external systems. It resolves critical integration challenges, accelerating the creation of robust, production-ready AI tools across industries.
- •The Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard for connecting LLMs to external tools, has been donated by Anthropic to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation.
- •MCP addresses the "n x m integration problem" by providing a vendor-neutral protocol, standardizing how AI models communicate with diverse services like databases and CI pipelines.
- •Before MCP, developers faced fragmented APIs and brittle, platform-specific integrations, hindering secure and consistent AI agent development.
- •This transition ensures long-term stewardship and a stable foundation for developers building production AI agents and enterprise systems.
- •MCP's rapid adoption highlights its critical role in enabling secure, auditable, and cross-platform communication for AI in various industries.
Why it matters: This article provides a blueprint for implementing "shift left" security and IaC at enterprise scale, crucial for preventing misconfigurations, enhancing consistency, and improving operational efficiency in large, complex environments.
- •Cloudflare adopted "shift left" principles and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to manage its critical platform securely and consistently at enterprise scale.
- •All production account configurations are managed via IaC using Terraform, integrated with a custom CI/CD pipeline (Atlantis, GitLab, tfstate-butler).
- •A centralized monorepo holds all configurations, with teams owning their specific sections, promoting accountability and consistency.
- •Security baselines are enforced through Policy as Code (Open Policy Agent with Rego), shifting validation to the earliest stages of development.
- •Policies are automatically checked on every merge request, preventing misconfigurations before deployment and minimizing human error.
Why it matters: This system provides real-time, statistically robust insights into content safety, enabling platforms to proactively identify and mitigate harms. It's crucial for maintaining user trust and scaling content moderation efficiently with AI.
- •Pinterest developed an AI-assisted system to measure "prevalence" of policy-violating content, focusing on the percentage of total views.
- •This system addresses the shortcomings of report-only metrics, which often miss under-reported harms and lack statistical power.
- •It utilizes ML-assisted sampling from daily user impressions, leveraging production risk scores for efficiency while ensuring unbiased prevalence estimates.
- •A multimodal LLM (vision + text) enables bulk labeling of sampled content, significantly reducing latency and cost compared to human review.
- •Inverse-probability weighting ensures unbiased, design-consistent prevalence metrics, decoupling measurement from enforcement model thresholds.
- •Continuous calibration, human validation, and periodic checks against SME-labeled gold sets maintain LLM accuracy and detect model drift.
- •The system provides daily, statistically powered insights for faster interventions and effective content safety tracking.
Why it matters: This incident underscores the critical impact of configuration management in distributed systems. It highlights how rapid, global deployments without gradual rollouts and robust error handling can lead to widespread outages, even from seemingly minor code paths.
- •A 25-minute Cloudflare outage on Dec 5, 2025, impacted 28% of HTTP traffic due to a configuration change.
- •The incident stemmed from disabling an internal WAF testing tool, intended to mitigate a React Server Components vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182).
- •A global configuration system, lacking gradual rollout, propagated a change that triggered a Lua runtime error in the FL1 proxy.
- •The error was an attempt to access a nil value ('rule_result.execute') when a killswitch skipped an "execute" action rule, a bug undetected for years.
- •This highlights the need for robust type systems and safe deployment practices, especially for critical infrastructure.
- •Cloudflare acknowledges similar past incidents and is prioritizing enhanced rollouts and versioning to prevent future widespread impacts.
Why it matters: GitHub Copilot Spaces significantly reduces the time engineers spend hunting for context during debugging by providing AI with project-specific knowledge. This leads to faster, more accurate solutions and streamlined development workflows.
- •GitHub Copilot Spaces enhances AI debugging by providing project-specific context like files, pull requests, and issues, leading to more accurate suggestions.
- •Spaces act as dynamic knowledge bundles, automatically syncing with linked content to ensure Copilot always has up-to-date information.
- •Users create a space, add relevant project assets (e.g., security docs, architecture overviews, specific issues), and define custom instructions for Copilot's behavior.
- •Copilot leverages this curated context to generate detailed debugging plans and propose code changes, citing its sources for transparency and auditability.
- •The integrated coding agent can then create pull requests with before/after versions, explanations, and references to the guiding instructions and files.