The layer of security around today’s Internet is essential to safeguarding everything. From the way we shop online, engage with our communities, access critical healthcare resources, sustain the worldwide digital economy, and beyond. Our dependence on the Internet has led to cyber attacks that are bigger and more widespread than ever, worsening the so-called defender’s dilemma: attackers only need to succeed once, while defenders must succeed every time.
In the past year alone, we discovered and mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded in the history of the Internet – three different times – underscoring the rapid and persistent efforts of threat actors. We helped safeguard the largest year of elections across the globe, with more than half the world’s population eligible to vote, all while witnessing geopolitical tensions and war reflected in the digital world.
2025 already promises to follow suit, with cyberattacks estimated to cost the global economy $10.5 trillion in 2025. As the rapid advancement of AI and emerging technologies increases, and as threat actors become more agile and creative, the security landscape continues to drastically evolve. Organizations now face a higher volume of attacks, and an influx of more complex threats that carry real-world consequences, such as state-sponsored cyber attacks and assaults on critical infrastructure.
My job is to protect Cloudflare as an organization and support our customers in staying one step ahead of threat actors. While every week is a security week at Cloudflare, it’s time to ship — that’s what Innovation Weeks are all about! Welcome to Security Week 2025.
As CSO, I have the privilege of collaborating with world-class security leaders who are navigating the dynamic threat and regulatory landscape. Through meaningful exchanges at forums like the World Economic Forum at Davos, RSA, and Black Hat, I’ve gained useful perspectives on the shared difficulties we encounter while handling today’s security needs:
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Complexity: Complexity has become the enemy of security. Teams are struggling with fragmented technology stacks, multi-cloud environments and continued gaps in security talent. Situational awareness is limited, disparate systems increase operational overhead, and the ability to modernize becomes daunting.
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Artificial Intelligence: AI presents both opportunity and risk. Organizations are racing to leverage AI faster than they can train their workforce on how to mitigate the unique risks it introduces. Security teams are being asked to secure AI models to protect sensitive data and support operational stability, all on constrained budgets and resources.
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Security blind spots: The attack surface continues to expand. With remote work, cloud migration, and the acceleration of digital transformation, security teams struggle to maintain visibility across increasingly distributed environments. This expansion has created blind spots that sophisticated threat actors are quick to exploit.
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Trusted vendors: Supply chain security incidents increase year over year. Recent high-profile incidents have demonstrated how vulnerabilities in third-party components can cascade through the digital ecosystem. Security teams must account for risks far beyond their immediate perimeter, extending to every dependency in their technology stack.
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Detection velocity: The time it takes to detect a threat actor in your environment remains too long. Despite investments in monitoring and detection technologies, the average dwell time for attackers still exceeds industry targets. Security leaders express frustration that sophisticated adversaries can operate undetected within networks for extended periods of time.
What’s clear across the security community is that the traditional approach of layering point solutions is not sustainable. Security leaders need integrated platforms that reduce complexity while providing comprehensive protection and visibility. This is precisely why I joined Cloudflare nearly two years ago — to help build innovative solutions for today’s threat landscape and the future, not the threat landscape from five years ago.
Over the following week we will showcase innovation that will help security practitioners solve the challenges faced every day. As leader of the security organization at Cloudflare, and Customer Zero, our team has influenced the product updates launching this week.
Here is a preview of what you can expect this week:
Quantum computing will change the face of Internet security forever — particularly in the realm of cryptography, which is the way communications and information are secured across channels like the Internet.
As quantum computing continues to mature, research and development efforts in cryptography are keeping pace. We’re optimistic that collaborative efforts among NIST, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and other computing companies will yield a robust, standards-based solution.
Cloudflare will announce advancements to its cloud-native quantum-safe zero trust solution, the first of its kind. This ensures future-proof security for corporate network traffic in an easily adoptable way for our customers. The updates shared by our product team will redefine how businesses and individuals navigate our evolving post-quantum landscape.
Effective security programs need to stay two steps ahead of emerging threats. Threat intelligence available to most security teams comes without context, making it challenging to react accordingly.
This week, we’re launching our threat events platform, providing our customers real-time cyber threat intelligence data. By leveraging our network footprint, customers will have a comprehensive view of cyber threats based on attacks occurring across the Internet.
This product will enable users to self-serve with contextual insights into attacks occurring on the Internet, enhancing their ability to proactively adjust defenses and respond to emerging threats. As security practitioners, stopping threats at the gate isn’t enough — we need to be ahead of the next vector. The Threat Events feed provides that additional layer of forensic analysis to give us that edge — dissecting the who, how, and why behind each attack. It’s like performing an autopsy on the threats we neutralize, revealing patterns, tactics, and potential weaknesses in our defenses that raw data alone might miss.
No surprise, AI is still the number one topic of discussion. AI is a common theme across all industries, with a core concern of how to secure and protect our investments. As a leader in providing infrastructure for AI training and inference, our engineering and product teams have been working hard on building a way to protect our own, and our customers’, AI models, data, and applications.
This week, our product team will share how our users can gain greater control over their data with our new Firewall for AI and improved capabilities for our related AI Gateway. As the world shifts its focus from building models to actively deploying them, you need to protect against third parties exploiting your data to train their own generative AI systems.
Alongside this, we’ll provide security teams with visibility and protection across all web and enterprise applications from a single, unified platform. This new capability can pinpoint the location of all applications across your organization, understand corresponding potential threats, and provide risk reduction recommendations.
Beyond new tools and features, Security Week 2025 represents our commitment to our mission of helping build a better Internet.
What sets Cloudflare apart is our unique position at the intersection of security and innovation. The solutions we’re unveiling this week aren’t just responses to today’s threats, they’re forward-looking innovations that anticipate tomorrow’s challenges. They reflect our understanding that security must evolve from being reactive to predictive, from complex to intuitive, and from siloed to integrated.
Innovation Weeks have become a cornerstone of how we connect with our community at Cloudflare. For me personally, each Security Week brings renewed energy and perspective. The conversations with customers, security practitioners, and industry leaders continuously reshapes our understanding of what’s possible.
I invite you to engage with us throughout the week, whether through live demos, technical deep dives, or direct conversations with our team. My hope is that you’ll walk away not just with new tools, but with a clearer vision of how we can collectively build a safer Internet experience for everyone.
The future of security isn’t about building higher walls, it’s about creating smarter ecosystems. Let’s build that future together.
