Application Security report: 2024 update

This post provides a 2024 update on Cloudflare's Application Security Report, detailing key trends and metrics observed across its network. It highlights a significant increase in mitigated traffic (averaging 7%), with WAF and Bot mitigations accounting for over half. DDoS attacks remain the primary vector, with a notable increase in volumetric attacks and application-layer HTTP DDoS attacks. The report emphasizes the rapid weaponization of CVEs, with exploits occurring as quickly as 22 minutes after proof-of-concept release, necessitating ML-based approaches to complement human-written WAF rules. Bot traffic constitutes about a third of observed traffic, with 93% being potentially malicious. API traffic now accounts for 60% of all traffic, with a concerning quarter of endpoints unaccounted for. The proliferation of third-party integrations in web applications is also highlighted, with enterprise sites integrating an average of 47 third-party endpoints. The report also quantifies the growth in Cloudflare's network capacity and threat mitigation, noting a substantial year-over-year increase in blocked cyber threats.