🚀 Cloudflare Radar - Launch Day @Birthday Week

Hello everyone. Welcome to our Cloudflare birthday week special. This week marks Cloudflare's 10th birthday and each day of this week we are announcing new products, which basically are our gifts to the Internet.

Today we released Cloudflare Radar, which is a public-facing Internet intelligence platform that lets anybody on the Internet view the latest global trends, Internet traffic patterns, threat intelligence, and all this for free.

I'm Deeksha Lamba and I'm a part of the product marketing team at Cloudflare.

With me I have Marc Lamik, who is the product manager for Cloudflare Radar, our new release today.

So Marc, to kick off the discussion, tell us about Cloudflare Radar.

What is it that you're launching today?

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Deeksha. Yeah, we're super happy to launch Cloudflare Radar, where we really take the opportunity to share the data that we're having as Cloudflare as being like kind of in the very center of the Internet and to really use that data and share it with the public to generate insights, to generate knowledge, but to also share some trivia.

I think it's both like security information, trivia, Internet trends, patterns.

So we just launched today with our first version.

And in the end, if you look at Radar, we're starting with our news section.

So when something comes up on the Internet and we see it, then we're posting it there.

So the moment you're finding some information there on like HTTP3 negotiations, we actually saw a pretty big traffic and DOS attack spike in Azerbaijan in the last week during the start of the conflict.

And interestingly, just from yesterday to today, the US broadcaster NPR just jumped 800 places in our top 15 trending domains ranking worldwide.

So there are some interesting things going on, and we're kind of keeping that up to date and making sure that everyone is constantly informed about what's happening.

Okay. Yeah. When we're going further down on Radar, you'll see the first section, which is mainly about Internet traffic.

So you can see the change in Internet traffic over like one hour, 24 hours, seven days.

We'll very soon be adding our 30-day option as well to also see more long-term trends.

We are showing some brief information like on one hand, what is the top domain in this case worldwide?

How is the trend of US activity, but also like what is the bot versus the human traffic and also mobile traffic?

One of the main features is that you can actually jump into any country. So if we, for example, want to jump into the United States, we are getting adjusted information for the US.

We can have a look at the seven-day graph there where we kind of see a very interesting or very standard day and night rhythm.

So, and you can see some spikes like Monday evening, but also like the adjusted information here on the US for mobile and bot traffic.

For those who are a bit more adventurous, you could just choose random and yeah, end up with some interesting country that most probably, at this one I have never looked at, which is Wally's and Fortuna Islands.

But you can, yeah, you can just get some information on countries that you most probably never heard of.

Very interesting.

We're sending out, when we are putting out new blog posts, new posts, new news posts on Radar, we are also informing you once you've signed for our alerts.

So if you sign up, you are always up to date with what we are putting on Radar.

Got it. And I believe we can also dig into specific domain and IPs if you want to, right?

Yes. So when we're going down to our next area, which is the trending and most popular domains, for this, we have to say, this is the one where we really need to train our algorithms and train our knowledge a bit over the next week.

So that's why we're still flagging this one as beta, especially on the trending domains.

We do see some work still necessary for us. So we are going to work on that as well over the next weeks.

And yeah, here you see the trending domains and the top domains.

I think within the top most popular ones, yeah, it's the very, the standard top four with like TikTok coming up on number five.

But also on the trending domains, there's some interesting ones and some big names like the NFL or Boeing or Disney.

If you want to dig in deeper into a domain, you can, for example, just search for one via the search bar, or you can just click on a domain.

So for example, if we now want to look at Google, you can get the information on google.com, which is a number of batches.

This especially focuses on security features that this domain has.

For example, it has a valid, uses TSL, has a valid SSL certificate, uses IPv6, uses ESNI.

But also if it's on the top 10 or how old it is.

We as well are showing the category of this domain. If users find a category that actually doesn't fit, you can click on the submit feedback button and you are able to submit your feedback on every domain that we have in the system.

When we're going down, we see the global popularity ranking trend, which for Google is not very surprisingly number one overall of the week.

And you also see a trend of the different locations where the visitors come from.

Also, not surprisingly, the US.

For Google, we, of course, if you have a domain hosted at Cloudflare in the Cloudflare dash and in the Cloudflare analytics, in some of that, which we also presented this week, you can get a way more deeper insights into your domain.

And I think this is something we always want to motivate our Cloudflare customers to have a look at as well.

We are also showing the whois information and the certificates for the domains as well.

So if we're looking, for example, at Cloudflare, then you can also find a more interesting trend on the global popularity ranking.

Yeah. And I think this would be also helpful. Sorry, go ahead. No, please go ahead.

No, I think these badges would also be helpful if someone wants to see why a certain IP or domain was blocked.

I mean, they'll know, you know, the different badges would help them classify what kind of security benchmark does the website or the domain have.

Definitely. And I think it's also good to know when people want to look up a domain to see, okay, this is really, it's long out there.

It's a popular domain.

It has like all security features. That's definitely showing, creating some kind of trust for that domain.

You can also look up specific IPs, like for example, our 1.1.1 IP.

This is also a section where we're looking into how we can expand that over time.

For now, you're seeing the ASN and as well as the country.

If users are interested in their own IP, they can just open rate of the Cloudflare.com slash me, and they'll get some more information on their own IP, including some location information that will be shown there.

Gotcha. Could you give us a brief on the ATT&CK activity and those insights that we are providing as well?

Yeah, definitely. So when we go back to the main page, going down to the next section, which is the ATT&CK activity.

So similar to the upper section, you can filter by timeframes.

You can select the latest seven days, 24 hours or one hour. What we are showing at the moment is our denial of service attacks on layer three and four, as well as our layer seven attacks.

Layer seven blocking can come from different systems.

It's the web application firewall, as well as our layer seven DDoS protection.

So you're seeing for the denial of service attacks, you're first seeing, okay, is it coming from TCP or UDP?

So what is the protocol? And then as well, the trend in the amount of attacks that we've seen over the last week.

For example, in here, we see kind of a big spike on Monday evening, which for example, could be related with the latest debate in the US.

I think one of the most interesting things with radar is that you can really try to build these connections of real world events and how they're reflected on the Internet.

So to really see, okay, if something is happening in the real world, what are the effects that come into the Internet from that?

So we really want to give people the opportunity to look them up and to really get this feeling in close to real time what is happening.

Yeah. And I think as the platform gets evolved, as we start adding more storylines to it as well, people can correlate between the different data points that we are seeing and the world events on the same platform there and then.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. When we're going down to layer seven, we are seeing a similar graph and as well, the different systems that have blocked the requests.

Sorry.

Sorry. Can these attack metrics be filtered by country at the moment, or if not, do you plan to add them in the future?

Yeah. Similar to the Internet traffic, we can also filter them by country.

For example, we're in Portugal here, so we can filter them by country.

And you'll see that, for example, the DOS peak that we've seen on Monday evening is completely invisible in Portugal.

So we haven't seen any attacks coming from Portugal, originating in Portugal during that time.

Yeah. I think for all data points that we have in there for graphs, we have a glossary where you can look up some more information about the different data points that we're having and some explanation on a lot of the words that we use that may not be known to everyone.

Going down, last but not least, we have the transport.

So there we are comparing different technologies, different safety features, different interesting stats of the traffic that we're seeing.

So starting with HTTP versus HTTPS, which is very different in different countries.

Similar to mobile versus desktop, I think this is something which is really interesting because you have some countries, like for example, if you're looking at South Africa, that has a huge mobile share, which is way bigger than desktop, whereas in, for example, here in Portugal, you still see that the desktop share is still higher than mobile.

Similar to bot versus human traffic, this is also different in different countries, also changes depending on how much bot traffic we're seeing could be also like attack traffic that comes from non-human traffic that in the end creates a spike there.

So it's kind of interesting to follow up with that as well.

And also good to see for users and for companies how much bot traffic do we actually expect in certain countries.

And then also to see, okay, what does the Cloudflare bot solution actually deliver to be able to mitigate some bot traffic for your own page?

Yeah. Super interesting. All these data points, I think extremely interesting, especially the fact that you can filter it by country.

I think that adds another slice to the entire data set that we have. Question for you, what really motivated you to build this platform?

What was that instigated?

Well, I think first of all, it was not me building that platform, but it was a huge team effort.

Actually, a lot of teams within Cloudflare were involved in this product, especially from different business units, from different locations.

So from San Francisco to Austin, to London, to Lisbon.

So we kind of had a very, very cool and diverse team that made this happen.

So we're really happy that this was a huge team effort.

In the end, we had like several angles to why we were building this.

On one hand, it was, we knew that we have a lot of knowledge and that we want to share this.

And this kind of follows our mission as well to help making the Internet better.

It is kind of, okay, how can we make it better? We can make it better by sharing the knowledge that we're having.

On the other hand, we are also getting a lot of questions around different areas that we see here.

Okay. Where like attacks coming from?

What is like information on domains? We're having a lot of customers, but also other users that are super interested in that.

And so we really saw like different angles that were asking for more information around Internet in general.

And while we're presenting a lot of and giving a lot of information to our customers about their own properties, this kind of really changes the focus to not only showing information about the properties of a customer, but about the whole of the Internet, also about different countries.

We'll be adding filters in the future as well, for example, filtering by industry.

So you can really dig down in different areas of the Internet and get a way broader view than just on your own properties.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we have in the past periodically shared this information, say in our blog post or maybe in our tweets.

And I think this platform just makes it more comprehensive and more real time if somebody really wants that sort of insights into traffic patterns or attack patterns.

Apart from say people who are just interested in looking at this information, what are the different use cases that you really envision that people would use radar for?

Yeah. I think there's like several use cases. On one hand, it's also we've heard from people, for example, from people from media outlets that they are interested to get to know, okay, this event is happening.

What is happening on the Internet?

I think there have been really, really interesting cases of Internet has been cut in certain countries.

Was that something that you could actually see?

How much did traffic go down? Huge attacks in different areas of the world.

How big were they? Can you compare them to other things? I think that's like information that we want to make available on a close to real time base.

I think, like you said, this is one of the use piece that we're not only releasing a report like every three months where we say, okay, this is what we saw, but we're actually releasing the data right at the moment where we're seeing it.

So you can really get up to date information.

As I said, it's media outlets, it's companies, it's people like security officers and companies who are interested in getting to know more about the Internet and the threats that are out there.

So I think there's a very broad spectrum of users and that's where we try to cater towards.

So it's a lot of different information in different scales. So we really want to give the information to a very diverse set of users to make sure that we can cater to all of them with interesting data.

I think another important aspect is that we're not making this data gated.

It's free. There might be other sources of information also there, but eventually people have to pay for it.

I think the fact that we're making it free and it's so easily accessible just empowers the Internet because everybody knows what's happening and just makes everything more secure.

I want to double tap on something that you just said, security professionals.

So I know you work very closely with the security professionals within Cloudflare and also security professionals who are customers.

How do you see security professionals using this data?

And over time, how have you seen the usage of data by security professionals evolve?

And where does data actually fit in?

I know it's a long question, but I hope you get a sense of where I'm going.

Yeah. But overall, the use of data has become more and more important because the scope of threats changed very much from a local scope to with more things moving into the Internet, a lot of things moving into the cloud, the threats become very global and having an overview of the global landscape is getting more and more important.

Is it because you're using Cloudflare for Teams and you want to get an information on different domains that are used, so you can look up domains here.

This is one of the very hands-on use cases, but it's also keeping a good eye on general threat intelligence around the Internet, kind of to look at different countries to see, okay, what is actually the threat potential that comes from different countries?

Because in the end, you want to keep your network, you want to keep your cloud premises as safe as possible.

So I think keeping up to date with trends and threat intelligence has become a more and more important part of the security professionals' work.

And yeah, we want to cater to that without being too focused on only security professionals and still making sure that the data is also understandable and interesting for a broader public.

That makes sense. I think this is the question that you would have got in the past as well, but what makes Cloudflare data very different from others in the market?

Why should people actually, I mean, apart from the fact that you're sharing a very good set of information, why should people really care about it?

I think what was one of the reasons where we come from, we're coming from this being in the center of the Internet.

We have over 200 centers all over the world where we are kind of serving data.

We have a very diverse user group. I think this is one thing that also differentiates Cloudflare traffic because we know a lot about the Internet from small users to big users.

So we are hoping that our view on the Internet is kind of representative.

Of course, we know it's not never 100% representative, and this is something where we're pretty aware of, but we hope we are getting pretty close with a lot of the information that we're able to show and that we are providing to the radar users.

Yeah, totally. I mean, scale and heterogeneity of our data really makes a difference.

As a product manager, what was the most, what is the most difficult part of building this platform for you?

I know you've spent some sleepless nights on it, so I want to...

Yeah, I think for a product manager, especially working on such a product, and again, it's not only like this one product manager building something like that, but it's a huge, huge team effort.

Still, it's again, the bigger the team and the kind of more general the product, which is we are having something everyone can use, the more kind of opinions you have around the product.

So kind of building something that in the end is useful to a very diverse set of users, but it's also kind of using a very diverse set of information from different Cloudflare products and getting all of this together.

And really, we got so much help from all of the Cloudflare teams that made it happen, that we actually got all this information together in one place and able to show it.

This kind of was a huge effort and especially also a huge effort on the product side.

And then really to prioritize what can we get in there, what is feasible, what adds real value for users, that in the end was, I think was and will be the biggest challenge because we're not finished.

I think this is the first version.

We're really happy to share that with the public, but it's by far not everything we have in our plans, everything we want to launch.

We actually had to cut a lot of things because otherwise we would have most probably built for years.

But yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff there that we want to share and a lot of interesting stuff that we want to get out to ship to our users.

Yeah.

And like Michelle always says, we're just getting started and this is especially true for Radar.

Last question, tell us about some cool new features, data sets that you plan to add maybe over the next quarter or six months.

Yeah. Well, I think one thing that we already talked a bit about where we are really excited about is looking into other filters like filtering by industry.

I think that will give, again, a very different view on like the Internet when you're not only looking by country.

Because I think the cool thing about Internet that it doesn't end in a country, but it's a very global it's a very global thing.

And let's hope it stays like this.

Other things is like we really want to pick up on trends and new technologies to really show the adoption rate of new technologies.

We have some interesting stuff in there, but we really want to stay kind of free on top of that, what happens in technology.

And that fits super well, like to a lot of things that we're doing within Cloudflare because we are really ambitious about driving new technology, especially when it comes to making the Internet safer.

And to also visualizing that to a broader public where we are and where we still need to get better as the Internet as a whole is definitely something where we are going to spend a lot of time.

And then also like, I think one of the features that I'm most interested in and which we're hopefully going to launch very, very soon is to get a longer time range, because then you can really see more long-term trends.

And I think this will be adding like another level of information to Radar.

Awesome. I believe you showed us where people can sign us for the newsletter.

Is there a place where they can say provide feedback as well as they use this platform?

Sure.

Like we are always, I think one of the best ways to provide feedback about Radar is Twitter.

So Cloudflare is very active. Just follow us on Twitter, post your feedback.

Most of the people working at Cloudflare are very active, including myself, including a lot of people from the Radar team.

So please feel free to post there.

We are also very active on Hacker News. So already answered, like John, our CTO, who will be actually up in four minutes here, already answered a lot of questions on Hacker News.

So I think there's a lot of ways to get in touch with us.

And yeah, please feel free to ask questions. We are super happy about suggestions, how we can make Cloudflare better.

Awesome. Thank you, Mark. And congratulations for launching Cloudflare Radar today.

So yeah, everyone have a good day.

Thank you, Mark, for your time. Bye -bye. Thank you, Diksha. My name is Karan Tiwari.

I work as a Lead Architect in Adesa E-Commerce at Falabella.

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