And for those (like me) who didn’t know what “IDS” stands for, here are a few excerpts:
Today, we’re very excited to announce our plans for Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System, a new product that monitors your network and alerts when an attack is suspected. With deep integration into Cloudflare One, Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire global network and inspects all traffic for bad behavior, regardless of whether it came from outside or inside your network.
Enterprises build firewall rules to keep their networks safe from external and internal threats. When bad actors try to attack a network, those firewalls check if the attack matches a rule pattern. If it does, the firewall steps in and blocks the attack.
Teams used to configure those rules across physical firewall appliances, frequently of different makes and models, deployed to physical locations. Yesterday, we announced Magic Firewall, Cloudflare’s network-level firewall delivered in our data centers around the world. Your team can write a firewall rule once, deploy it to Cloudflare, and our global network will protect your offices and data centers without the need for on-premises hardware.
This is great if you know where attacks are coming from. If you don’t have that level of certainty, finding those types of attacks becomes expensive guesswork. Sophisticated attackers can prod a network’s defenses to determine what rules do or do not exist. They can exploit that information to launch quieter attacks. Or even worse: compromise your employees and attack from the inside.
We’re excited to end Zero Trust week by announcing one more thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System (IDS), a solution that analyzes your entire network simultaneously and alerts you to events that your rules might not catch.
Cloudflare IDS represents a critical piece of Cloudflare One. With WARP connecting your devices, and Magic Transit connecting your offices and data centers to Cloudflare, Cloudflare IDS sits on top of both, allowing you to examine and evaluate all traffic simultaneously. This gives you a single view of what’s happening inside of your network and where breaches might have occurred. Cloudflare IDS is also constantly getting better at identifying threats and attacks. You can opt in to receive alerts, and with a single-click, quickly and easily block intrusion attempts that sneak past static rules. Most importantly, your team benefits from the intelligence Cloudflare gathers from attacks in other regions or industries to flag events that impact you.
It sounds VERY impressive.
Saul