Q3 DDoS Threat Report and the Grand Opening of Cloudflare Lisbon

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in NET. It's the October 25th, 2024 edition. We have Manish Arora, Senior Manager of Engineering, explaining a record-breaking DDoS attack we shared two weeks ago.

This world record 3.8 terabytes per second DDoS attack was surpassed already this week with a similar one that reached 4.2 terabytes per second and less than a minute.

This attack is mentioned in our Q3 2024 DDoS report that was published this week.

You can look in the blog. So we recently wrote a blog post about the record-breaking hyper volumetric DDoS attack that we observed on our system.

Now DDoS attacks are getting hyper volumetric. They are getting bigger and bigger.

We saw a recent one peaking at 3.8 terabytes per second.

We are seeing the rise of these attacks and another trend that we are seeing is that the length of attacks are getting longer and longer.

What this means is that Internet properties need to be super super diligent in securing their web infrastructure.

This particular attack was a highly distributed attack originating from multiple types of compromised devices including microtech devices.

There were some DVRs and also some web servers that participated in the attack.

Now the attack was originating from various different countries spread across the world.

We saw attacks from Russia, we saw attack from Vietnam, we saw attack traffic coming from United States and some part of Europe and South America.

In today's world which is already seeing polarization and many wars being fought, it's critical that Internet continues to be a safe place and businesses can operate without disruptions.

Now Cloudflare provides protection against DDoS attacks and it's imperative that customers adopt this positive security model which is a layered approach to security where they have the right tools for the right kind of cyber attacks that we are seeing today.

And this one is a special episode about our grand opening of the new Lisbon office in Portugal that happened last week.

Olá a todos portugueses, hello to all Portuguese around.

The Lisbon office is now our office with higher growth worldwide where several products are being built including AI products.

We already have over 340 people in Portugal and we continue to hire.

So next we have some words from some of our leaders about it. I'm John Graham Cumming, I'm Cloudflare's CTO and head of the Lisbon office.

We came to Lisbon in 2019 in August.

I came to Lisbon at the same time in 2019 so it's been five years and we came with a team of about 14 people originally.

We had a little office in Nishadu and now here we are in the big office in Alcântara with I think it's 344 people total in Portugal.

And so it's been quite a lot of growth. Obviously we got slowed down a little bit by COVID because you know I moved to Portugal just before I got locked up in an apartment which was an unusual experience.

But you know over time we've grown and grown and we are continuing to grow very rapidly.

And I think the nice thing is that in Lisbon we started with a sort of mixture of product and engineers and security people and all those departments have grown rapidly as well as all the rest.

So finance and HR and sales. So it's really become a very significant office for Cloudflare and is in fact our European headquarters.

Well I think it was sort of natural because you know as we grew we became such a significant number of people in Lisbon we needed a new space and obviously it became very obvious to us this should be our European headquarters as the company has grown.

We have offices all over Europe in Munich and in Paris and in London but Lisbon has grown enormously and we really needed our own space.

So we were on Marques de Pombal obviously an iconic location which was fantastic but we were in a bit of a limited space and so when this building came along you know we had the freedom to build something like we've built in other parts of the world and you know here we are opening the office.

I think Lisbon is attractive for a whole load of different reasons.

You know we came here because we wanted a location in Europe where we could attract people and where there was already a local pool of talent and to give you an idea of it right now 60% of our staff are Portuguese and 40 % are from other locations mostly from across Europe and so you've got a good mixture of people who are local who've had a fantastic university education a fantastic experience elsewhere and are now at Cloudflare and then you've got you know people from across Europe and some people from outside of Europe as well.

So the growth has been you know across all those different groups and groups of people and how much more growth?

Well I think you know we obviously have we're in this very large building here and we hope to expand and expand and expand in it.

As I said we're something like 344 people right now it's easy to see another 250, 300 and so on.

There's really no slowing down to the growth in Lisbon. We've made a significant investment here and we continue to grow here so I think you know you're going to see this grow and I look forward today we have a thousand people here.

Well I mean there's all sorts of things in the office that we try to make a mixture of sort of the Cloudflare global feeling so you can imagine the colors and the logos and style of furnishing all that sort of stuff and then local things as well so you won't be surprised there's quite a lot of tiling so you know quite a lot of azulejos in the office some of it specifically around the Internet and there's a whole wall of sardines made of ceramic which actually spell out a secret message in fact a Portuguese message in Portuguese piece of poetry there and then you're talking about the wall of entropy so all of Cloudflare's offices have what we call the wall of entropy which is a combination of an artwork and something quite practical which is a piece of art that is in motion and in particular is in random motion so in San Francisco we have lava lamps in London we have pendulums which are double pendulums are swinging wildly and here in Lisbon because we're quite close to the river just outside the window here we have something that's water-based so that will be revealed fairly soon but it's based on wave the motion of waves which is random and that gives us a way to generate random numbers and you might think well what is the importance of random numbers well random numbers are fundamental to encryption on the Internet and a big part of what Cloudflare does is makes the Internet more secure a big part of that is cryptography I think the thing about the wall of entropy is it explains in a artistic and simple to understand manner something which is quite complicated which is that fundamentally we need these random numbers where you get random numbers from and computers are very bad at making random numbers because they are deterministic they do exactly what you tell them so even when you have a random number generation a computer is actually spitting out what looks like randomness but is entirely predictable we need something which is not predictable because if it was predictable you could break the encryption and nature gives us lots of different random things the motion of those blobs in a lava lamp is unpredictable a double pendulum is unpredictable and wave patterns so these things I think explain to people what we do in a very simple manner I mean there are some Portuguese words which are which are very interesting I think you know when I think about moving to Portugal when I moved here I think I was the only British person who'd never been to Portugal right it's very famous in Britain that many British people go to the Algarve and they go and play golf and all that kind of stuff I had never been to Portugal I came here on a visit as we were looking for a location and decided to to move here and in part because I used to live in California I used to live in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley and there are very many similarities in fact between this area if you look out the window behind us not just the bridge but also in terms of the climate and the spirit and the food and you sort of end up feeling like that same kind of spirit also exists obviously Lisbon is not known as the Silicon Valley but there are very many good engineers here and companies that are being you know built here and one of the reasons why we decided to invest and then in terms of favorite words that's hard to answer um one of my favorite things about Portuguese is that Portuguese has helped me with my French and I'll tell you why I speak French but I learned it as an adult I didn't learn it as a child and I have a very very difficult time with masculine and feminine words because I do not know if a word is masculine feminine I super appreciate that in Portuguese it's pretty easy to figure it out if it ends with an r or an a you pretty much know whether it's masculine or feminine and it turns out because they're both Latin roots that you can use that to figure out what the gender of the word is in French and so I've been going back to French via Portuguese so I appreciate that just for that one thing that learning Portuguese is that but actually probably my favorite word uh if you had to if you had to ask me is or shallow because or shallow which comes from Arabic originally in shallow uh meaning you know god willing in Arabic um which has now become sort of expression in Portuguese which is well if it works out if it's it's it's you see the root of that language in the Portuguese language but I actually think the thing I most like about Portuguese is that it is very flexible in terms of the way in which things are said so if you listen to people speak it whether they're from Portugal the north or the south or somebody from one of the islands or somebody from Brazil when they're speaking Brazilian Portuguese there's all these different ways of seeing these and so it's wonderful to have learned the language and see all that variety in it well of course there's lots of them in Europe it's a bit like saying to someone what's your favorite child right because of all these products and I love all of them and I built some of them in London before I came here but I think two that were built in Lisbon in large part are our AI products there's a lot of stuff going into our AI products which is built here and also a product called Cloudflare Radar which is really unique because we have such a lot of data about the use of the Internet about the trends in the Internet outages problems etc we present that to the public and no one else does that no one else will give you an insight so people can go to radar .Cloudflare.com and look at you know oh you know is there a problem in Portugal with this particular you know ISP today or is you know is this event having an effect on the Internet or just other statistical information that's unique and that was made here.

Hi I'm Janelle Reilly I am the Chief Accounting Officer here at Cloudflare and I'm based in San Francisco Bay Area.

It's incredibly important to the accounting team to have the Lisbon office we have a really strong talent base here and the talent base has been growing over time I had a wonderful lunch with the team where I were able to reflect on the history of where the team has been and where we're going.

The Lisbon office helps just us attract talent it helps us have our heritage even more come to life as we meet together here in this office and it just engenders pride in how we have grown as a company and what the future is for us when we come to a place as beautiful as this office and we see what what we've accomplished together.

Yeah so over five years ago I convinced one of my product managers from Austin to move to Lisbon I said we're gonna be building out one of the next big engineering and offices out here and he should come and live with John and help be part of building something special out in Lisbon.

You know five years later over 10% of my team is in Lisbon and we are actively hiring a lot more engineers and product people to come join the team and help build the future of the Internet here at Cloudflare.

Hello my name is Celso Martinho I've been with Cloudflare for about four and a half years I'm a Senior Engineering Director run multiple teams most of those teams are in Lisbon.

Cloudflare is now a tech company that operates at a global scale as a huge network we estimate that about 20 to 25% of the global Internet traffic goes through our network and there's not a lot of places in Portugal where you can find companies where your work your contribution can actually affect the Internet for the better.

You actually have an opportunity to see the result of your work impact the world and I'm not aware of any other company in Portugal where you have that opportunity to do so many challenging things solve so many complex and interesting problems at the scale at which we are.

So that's one. So the second thing I would mention is even though Cloudflare is a big company now the numbers show it clearly funny enough and this is one of the main reasons why I joined the company myself four and a half years ago is that we're still in the beginning of the exponential curve and what I'm trying to say by this is that there's there's still a lot to build there's still a lot to do we're not a company that's you know doing small incremental improvements we're launching new completely new products every quarter so for those who like to build you know stuff for those who like to build products from scratch there's a lot to do over the next years and this is very exciting for folks that like to build stuff.

My name is Doug Kramer I'm the Chief Legal Officer at Cloudflare.

I've been with the company about eight years now in that capacity and I oversee our legal operations our policy team and then also our trust and safety operations.

It means we handle a lot of the legalities of running a company we deal with a lot of the disputes that come in and we try to anticipate where the regulatory environment is going and making sure that that what we do and our goals and values align with what countries are trying to do around the Internet.

About five years ago we made a very intentional decision to expand our global operations which were largely centered in San Francisco and London and Singapore to other locations as we investigated we saw so much opportunity in Lisbon and made the decision and after a couple of years in a an office space here a shared office space here we decided to make the very significant commitment to building out our own space for the long term here in Lisbon.

We looked at a lot of different options a lot of different cities in a lot of different countries and what stood out for us about Lisbon was I mean first and foremost the people not only the talent that we saw here but also in Portuguese citizens who had moved away and were interested in moving back but also a group of very collaborative people people that we enjoyed spending time with people that we thought were creative and thoughtful and hard-working.

I think first and foremost it was that I think in addition you know we saw the opportunity to to step into this community and be successful but also be a very global company in a city that has a lot of attributes that that apply globally and we've certainly seen that that research we did in those decisions pay off for us.

That's it for this week that's a wrap.