Cloudflare employees were recently targeted by a “sophisticated” cyberattack, and even though some fell for the scheme, the DDoS protection company managed to successfully defend itself.
In a blog post(opens in new tab), Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince, together with team members Daniel Stinson-Diess and Sourov Zaman, explained how the attack happened and what made the difference between success and failure.
The threat actor made a couple of key preparations ahead of the attack: they registered a domain that looked legitimate and would fool many victims: cloudflare-okta.com. Okta is Cloudflare’s identity provider. They also managed to somehow obtain the phone numbers of almost 80 Cloudflare employees, as well as family members for some.