Cloudflare’s Threat Events provides security analysts with a window into the global threat landscape. The platform offers a peek into the immense traffic that Cloudflare processes every day, so you can see in real time which IPs are attacking specific industries or which threat actors are trending globally. However, translating that visibility into active mitigation has often been a manual, reactive process.

Security teams have faced a recurring frustration: knowing that certain IP addresses were associated with specific threat actors (like Tycoon 2FA or RaccoonO365) or had been seen targeting their specific industry in other regions, but they couldn't easily automate the blocking of these high-risk IPs within their own WAF unless they manually configured the rules. 

We are excited to announce a new integration that brings Cloudflare’s vast threat intelligence directly into your WAF engine: you can now write proactive rules using live intelligence data. This means you can add more intelligence context to protect your application against known bad actors — before they even attempt to touch your infrastructure.

By populating specialized fields during the early stages of a request, the WAF can now screen traffic based on:

• Who is attacking by matching specific threat actor names
• Who they are targeting via the industry or country filters to see who the IP has targeted in the past
• What type of attack using enriched threat context, filtering by attack type (DDoS, WAF, cybercrime, etc.) and the timeframe it was last seen

Always-on detection

This new capability is built on the same always-on detection framework we recently introduced for Attack Signature Detection, a system that identifies common attack patterns in real time without requiring pre-configured rules. By separating detection from mitigation, we ensure that threat intelligence is constantly running in the background, enriching your HTTP request analytics with insightful threat metadata before you even decide to take an action.

The primary advantage of an "always-on" model is the elimination of the traditional "log vs. block" trade-off: visibility in log mode, or protection in block mode. That’s because when a rule blocks a request, you lose visibility into how other signatures would have assessed it — insight that could have helped you strengthen your defenses.

If you have a Cloudforce One subscription, these insights appear in your analytics automatically. You can see which threat actors are hitting your site and which industries those IPs usually target, allowing you to verify traffic patterns before "flipping the switch" to block.

These detections execute with negligible latency, ensuring your performance remains lightning-fast while providing the high-confidence data needed to build robust security policies. While this initial release focuses on IP-based matching, we are already looking toward extending these capabilities to JA3 fingerprints and domain-based matching. This will allow you to block malicious traffic even when attackers rotate IPs, by identifying the unique software signatures or malicious destination links they use in their payloads.

New WAF fields

To make this possible, we've exposed the following specific signals directly to the WAF engine:

Example rule expressions

Because a single IP address could be associated with multiple threat actors or targeted industries simultaneously, these fields are represented as arrays. We use the any() function and [*] wildcard to check whether any value within that threat profile matches your criteria:

• Block known DDoS participants targeting your region: any(cf.intel.ip.target_countries[*] == "FR") and any(cf.intel.ip.datasets[*] == "ddos")
• Protect against specific threat actors targeting the Finance sector: any(cf.intel.ip.target_industries[*] == "Banking & Financial Services") and any(cf.intel.ip.attacker_names[*] == "BLACKBASTA")
• Broad protection against specific high-risk origin countries: any(cf.intel.ip.attacker_countries[*] == "IR")

How to use Threat Events data in your workflows

Whether you prefer a UI-driven approach or Infrastructure as Code, these fields are integrated into your existing workflows.

The WAF rule builder (API & Terraform)

For teams that prefer Infrastructure as Code, the new cf.intel fields are fully integrated into the WAF rule builder for WAF custom rules and rate limiting. You can write complex expressions using the same syntax you use today. Because these are standard WAF fields, they are fully supported via the Cloudflare API and Terraform, allowing you to automate threat blocking across your selected domains or even on your whole account.

^{New fields added to the WAF rule builder to allow users to choose the relevant configuration based on the Threat Events indicators.} 

Visibility in Security Analytics

Deployment is only half the battle. All matches triggered by these threat intelligence fields are logged in Security Analytics. You can drill down into your traffic to see exactly which rule was triggered and which specific indicator matched. These enriched logs allow for faster auditing and postmortem analysis when a rule triggers.

^{Threat event matches surface in Security Analytics, with full context and a one-click option to create a custom security rule.}

One-click rule from the Threat Events dashboard

If you are already using the Threat Intelligence Dashboard to investigate trends, you don't have to copy and paste IP lists. You can create Saved Views based on your specific filters, such as "IPs seen attacking the Financial sector in the last seven days." With a single click, you can export these filters directly into a WAF rule.

^{Saved Views now allow users to easily create WAF rules to match the saved view configuration.} 

Global intelligence across our network

Visibility and ease of use are only possible if the underlying engine is fast. How do we handle millions of threat indicators without slowing down your traffic?

These threat intelligence datasets are compressed into a high-performance format and distributed to every single Cloudflare data center globally. When a request hits our network, the Cloudflare WAF performs an O(1) constant-time lookup against these local datasets. This ensures that whether we are checking against ten indicators or ten million, the latency overhead remains effectively zero (measured in microseconds).

Because an IP can be associated with multiple threat vectors, our engine doesn't stop at the first match. It evaluates the set of all signals associated with that IP simultaneously. This ensures that a rule looking for "Attacker = RU" AND "Target Industry = Banking" will trigger correctly by evaluating the intersection of these attributes in a single pass, providing maximum coverage against multi-vector actors without increasing computational complexity.

Ready to get started?

This feature is available today for customers with any active Cloudforce One subscription:

• Cloudforce One Essentials allows customers to access the default datasets in Threat Events, search for indicators, and conduct threat-hunting investigations
• Cloudforce One Advantage allows customers to access our Threat Intelligence Analyst custom insights via requests for information
• Cloudforce One Elite — our most complete package — includes brand protection, a high number of requests for information, and access to all Threat Events datasets

Ready to turn global insights into local defense? Head over to Threat Events or the WAF section of your Cloudflare Dashboard to start building your first Threat Intel rule, or contact your account team to learn more about subscribing to Cloudforce One.

Security professionals everywhere face a paradox: while more data provides the visibility needed to catch threats, it also makes it harder for humans to process it all and find what's important. When there’s a sudden spike in suspicious traffic, every second counts. But for many security teams — especially lean ones — it’s hard to quickly figure out what’s going on. Finding a root cause means diving into dashboards, filtering logs, and cross-referencing threat feeds. All the data tracking that has happened can be the very thing that slows you down — or worse yet, what buries the threat that you’re looking for. 

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve solved that problem. We’ve integrated Cloudy — Cloudflare’s first AI agent — with our security analytics functionality, and we’ve also built a new, conversational interface that Cloudflare users can use to ask questions, refine investigations, and get answers.  With these changes, Cloudy can now help Cloudflare users find the needle in the digital haystack, making security analysis faster and more accessible than ever before.  

Since Cloudy’s launch in March of this year, its adoption has been exciting to watch. Over 54,000 users have tried Cloudy for custom rule creation, and 31% of them have deployed a rule suggested by the agent. For our log explainers in Cloudflare Gateway, Cloudy has been loaded over 30,000  times in just the last month, with 80% of the feedback we received confirming the summaries were insightful. We are excited to empower our users to do even more.

Security analytics dashboards are powerful, but they often require you to know exactly what you're looking for — and the right queries to get there. The new Cloudy chat interface changes this. It is designed for faster root cause analysis (RCA) of traffic anomalies, helping you get from “something’s wrong” to “here’s the fix” in minutes. You can now start with a broad question and narrow it down, just like you would with a human analyst.

For example, you can start an investigation by asking Cloudy to look into a recommendation from Security Analytics.

From there, you can ask follow-up questions to dig deeper:

• "Focus on login endpoints only."

• "What are the top 5 IP addresses involved?"

• "Are any of these IPs known to be malicious?"

This is just the beginning of how Cloudy is transforming security. You can read more about how we’re using Cloudy to bring clarity to another critical security challenge: automating summaries of email detections. This is the same core mission — translating complex security data into clear, actionable insights — but applied to the constant stream of email threats that security teams face every day.

Analyzing your own logs is powerful — but it only shows part of the picture. What if Cloudy could look beyond your own data and into Cloudflare’s global network to identify emerging threats? This is where Cloudforce One's Threat Events platform comes in.

Cloudforce One translates the high-volume attack data observed on the Cloudflare network into real-time, attacker-attributed events relevant to your organization. This platform helps you track adversary activity at scale — including APT infrastructure, cybercrime groups, compromised devices, and volumetric DDoS activity. Threat events provide detailed, context-rich events, including interactive timelines and mappings to attacker TTPs, regions, and targeted verticals. 

We have spent the last few months making Cloudy more powerful by integrating it with the Cloudforce One Threat Events platform.  Cloudy now can offer contextual data about the threats we observe and mitigate across Cloudflare's global network, spanning everything from APT activity and residential proxies to ACH fraud, DDoS attacks, WAF exploits, cybercrime, and compromised devices. This integration empowers our users to quickly understand, prioritize, and act on indicators of compromise (IOCs) based on a vast ocean of real-time threat data. 

Cloudy lets you query this global dataset in a natural language and receive clear, concise answers. For example, imagine asking these questions and getting immediate actionable answers:

• Who is targeting my industry vertical or country?

• What are the most relevant indicators (IPs, JA3/4 hashes, ASNs, domains, URLs, SHA fingerprints) to block right now?

• How has a specific adversary progressed across the cyber kill chain over time?

• What novel new threats are threat actors using that might be used against your network next, and what insights do Cloudflare analysts know about them?

Simply interact with Cloudy in the Cloudflare Dashboard > Security Center > Threat Intelligence, providing your queries in natural language. It can walk you from a single indicator (like an IP address or domain) to the specific threat event Cloudflare observed, and then pivot to other related data — other attacks, related threats, or even other activity from the same actor. 

This cuts through the noise, so you can quickly understand an adversary's actions across the cyber kill chain and MITRE ATT&CK framework, and then block attacks with precise, actionable intelligence. The threat events platform is like an evidence board on the wall that helps you understand threats; Cloudy is like your sidekick that will run down every lead.

Developing this advanced capability for Cloudy was a testament to the agility of Cloudflare's AI ecosystem. We leveraged our Agents SDK running on Workers AI. This allowed for rapid iteration and deployment, ensuring Cloudy could quickly grasp the nuances of threat intelligence and provide highly accurate, contextualized insights. The combination of our massive network telemetry, purpose-built LLM prompts, and the flexibility of Workers AI means Cloudy is not just fast, but also remarkably precise.

And a quick word on what we didn’t do when developing Cloudy: We did not train Cloudy on any Cloudflare customer data. Instead, Cloudy relies on models made publicly available through Workers AI. For more information on Cloudflare’s approach to responsible AI, please see these FAQs.

This is just the next step in Cloudy’s journey. We're working on expanding Cloudy's abilities across the board. This includes intelligent debugging for WAF rules and deeper integrations with Alerts to give you more actionable, contextual notifications. At the same time, we are continuously enriching our threat events datasets and exploring ways for Cloudy to help you visualize complex attacker timelines, campaign overviews, and intricate attack graphs. Our goal remains the same: make Cloudy an indispensable partner in understanding and reacting to the security landscape.

The new chat interface is now available on all plans, and the threat intelligence capabilities are live for Cloudforce One customers. Learn more about Cloudforce One here and reach out for a consultation if you want to go deeper with our experts.