2023 phishing trends, useful intern projects, and Cloudflare's lava lamp history

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we discuss Cloudflare’s inaugural 2023 phishing threat report , which delves into millions of malicious emails, brand impersonations, identity deceptions, and other predominant attack trends based on a year's worth of email security data.

Next, we venture into a more technical realm with a blog post that offers developers an improved method to debug Rust and Wasm using our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. It is followed by two projects, conceived by Cloudflare’s interns, that evolved into features:

Debug Queues from the dash: send, list, and ack messages

Introducing scheduled deletion for Cloudflare Stream

We also shine a spotlight on our new AI hub: ai.cloudflare.com . Here, we explore how both individual developers and expansive enterprises are using Cloudflare to build AI tools. This includes the creation of ChatGPT plugins and a tour of some of our AI tools, like Constellation (allowing everyone to run machine learning models and perform inference on top of Cloudflare Workers).

Finally, we explain the history behind our use of lava lamps — and a lava lamp wall in our San Francisco office — for Internet security. These have come to symbolize Cloudflare’s commitment to security, rooted in the scientific principles of randomness and entropy. We'll retrace the journey from the idea in 2013 to its implementation in 2017. We'll also discuss how our lava lamps story became part of the culture, the subject of news articles , inspired a season of the TV show NCIS , and was popularized by a segment by science YouTuber Tom Scott .

Learning center: How do lava lamps help with Internet encryption?