August 12, 2022

Cloudflare: The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

Yesterday, August 8, 2022, Twilio shared that they’d been compromised by a targeted phishing attack. Around the same time as Twilio was attacked, we saw an attack with very similar characteristics also targeting Cloudflare’s employees. While individual employees did fall for the phishing messages, we were able to thwart the attack through our own use of Cloudflare One products, and physical security keys issued to every employee that are required to access all our applications.

We have confirmed that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Our Cloudforce One threat intelligence team was able to perform additional analysis to further dissect the mechanism of the attack and gather critical evidence to assist in tracking down the attacker.

This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached. Given that the attacker is targeting multiple organizations, we wanted to share here a rundown of exactly what we saw in order to help other companies recognize and mitigate this attack.

MORE FIDO in the News


GB News: If you’re using a password on this list, change it now – hackers could break into your account in seconds

The most common passwords of 2023, including “123456” and “admin,”...

December 1, 2023

Biometric Update: Digital IDs mean manageable and critical change, FIDO tells US federal security leaders

FIDO Alliance webinar aimed at U.S. federal data-security officials to...


Inside Cybersecurity: FIDO Alliance emphasizes need for agency feedback on implementing authentication standard

FIDO Alliance seeks increased government involvement to develop comprehensive guidelines...


Security Insider: Consumers are demanding password alternatives

For the third time, the FIDO Alliance’s annual online authentication...

November 13, 2023