This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
On 18 March, Spamhaus, an international organisation that tracks email spammers, contacted Matthew Prince, CEO of website security startup CloudFlare. " They were under attack," says Prince. "It was three times bigger than the previous largest such incursion." Once Spamhaus signed up, CloudFlare mitigated the barrage. "If you think of the internet as a series of tubes, what attackers tried to do was to fill the capacity of those tubes, so you couldn't access that particular site," explains Prince. "For example, a business such as Google has really big tubes, which means it's hard to disrupt them with this sort of attack.
CloudFlare also has really big tubes, so for the average website, we can absorb the attack and keep things running."
CloudFlare was cofounded by Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway, to make more widely available the online security resources that only the internet giants could afford. "The security industry is broken," says Prince. "If someone attacks Google, Google doesn't share knowledge of that attack with Yahoo!, so CloudFlare is more like an immune system. If there's an attack on one of our customers, information about that attack gets transmitted to everyone else in our network. We get smarter with every attack."
Today, the San Francisco-based company has more than a million customers, and is adding 10,000 more a week, protecting around three per cent of internet users. It has received $22.1 million (£14m) in venture funding. "Two years ago, about 200 Turkish-escort websites signed up," says Prince. "They were under attack from conservative Muslim groups. A year later, we got a call from Eurovision. They had a gay performer in the final in Azerbaijan, a Muslim-majority country, and because of that were being attacked.
We found out that the attackers were the same people behind the escort website attacks. Because of that we knew exactly how to protect them. That was a fundamental validation of our philosophy."
How CloudFlare unites Hamas and the IDF
CloudFlare has found itself on all sides of the Middle East conflict: the Muslim Brotherhood, the Israel Defence Forces, Hamas, the al-Quds Brigades and AIPAC (the lobbying group for strengthening US-Israel ties) are all CloudFlare customers. It has intercepted attacks on each group's website, with intelligence then shared across battle lines. "It's beautiful that the Muslim Brotherhood's site was safer because the Israel Defence Forces were also on CloudFlare," says Prince. "The system keeps getting smarter -- even people on opposite sides of a conflict can stay safe and secure online."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
