Application security: Cloudflare’s view
Mar 21, 2022Michael Tremante, Sabina Zejnilovic, David Belson

Summary
This post provides a data-driven overview of application security trends observed on the Cloudflare network between December 2021 and March 2022. It quantifies the volume of mitigated traffic (8% of total HTTP requests), breaking down mitigation sources by feature (Layer 7 DDoS, Custom WAF Rules, Rate Limiting, IP Threat Reputation, Managed WAF Rules). It details the most common attack vectors blocked by Managed WAF Rules, with HTTP anomalies being the most prevalent. The post also analyzes the fields used in custom WAF rules, highlighting the continued prevalence of IP addresses and standard HTTP request fields, while noting the shift towards Zero Trust approaches.
More from the Website Security & Threat Management trail
- We tested our own WAF with frontier AI models. Here’s what we found
- When scanners miss the attack: how Cloudflare Client-Side Security protects storefronts
- Introducing automatic remediation policies with Cloudflare CASB
- Introducing context-aware vulnerability discovery and remediation with Cloudflare Managed Defense and OpenAI Daybreak Models
- Introducing Adaptive Intelligence: undermining the economics of every bot attack