As AI enables more cyber attack vectors, Cloudflare is making it harder to be an attacker.
On Monday, the cloud company launched Adaptive Intelligence, a continuous detection engine that autonomously learns from live traffic and generates rules on the fly that make automated attacks more expensive and time-consuming. The offering gives organizations a way to adaptively and instantly react to threat actors trying to breach their defenses.
"Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero," Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare, said in the company's announcement. "To stop modern bot threats, you have to flip the economics on the attackers. Traditional defenses offer a static target that threat actors can systematically solve."
By analyzing more than a trillion web visits every day to spot threats, Cloudflare said that Adaptive Intelligence acts like a "single, constantly learning brain." This allows you to:
- Implement "always-on" defense that retrains continuously on new types of breach techniques, instead of waiting for updates and scheduled releases
- Catch "low-and-slow" threats, such as credential stuffing and scraping, that typically go under the radar of traditional defenses
- Sift out real humans from malicious intent using behavior signals from Cloudflare Precursor, its continuous behavioral verification system
- Autonomously test and deploy upgrades to defenses behind the scenes with zero downtime
AI has given threat actors two significant advantages: the ability to undertake cyberattacks at a rapid pace and the ability to do so at very low costs. Cloudflare's system aims to nullify both of those advantages, creating a "moving target," said Knecht.
This will only be more needed as frontier models emerge with cyber capabilities that are growing faster than even their creators have expected. It's a phenomenon that OpenAI has called attention to in recent weeks, pausing development of its unreleased frontier model, Astra, and calling for a global movement to strengthen cyber defenses broadly in a letter signed by a coalition of tech firms that included Cloudflare.
Our Deeper View #
If there's anything that frontier model capabilities have revealed in recent months, it's that enterprises can't rely on a "set it and forget it" cybersecurity strategy. Additionally, security by obscurity, or having the hubris to think you won't be a target because you're too small or insignificant, is also no longer an option. Cloudflare's tool offers a creative option by hitting cyber attackers in the wallet. The tool's adaptability can help create a constantly evolving barrier that helps enterprises better brace themselves against creative attacks from AI models. The silver lining to frontier models' growing cyber attack capabilities is that this new cyber landscape is acting as a forcing function and the result could be new innovations in cybersecurity that will make enterprises more resilient.