I joined Cloudflare 6 weeks ago with little fanfare and no public post. I was proud, excited, and grateful, but I knew the role was going to require a lot of focus.
And hey, in my head I was like... why? The people that need to know, already know.
BUT... This month is pride 🌈 and it has me thinking, about our ability to be ourselves and be safe online, at a time when freedoms around the world are being challenged, and stripped away. It has me grateful, and concerned, but today I'm really proud I work here.
Here's why: Project Galileo
This is not just a press release, it is a 10 year commitment to making the internet a safe place to be and it started because of a mistake.
"One evening, a site that was using us came under a significant DDoS attack, exhausting Cloudflare resources. After pulling up the site and seeing Cyrillic writing and pictures of men with guns, the young engineer on call followed the playbook. He pushed a button and sent all the attack traffic to the site’s origin, effectively kicking it off the Internet.
This was in 2014, during Russia’s first invasion into Ukraine, when Russia invaded Crimea. What the engineer did not know was that he had just kicked off an independent Ukrainian newspaper that was covering the attack and the invasions. The newspaper had tried to pay for services with a credit card but failed because Russia had targeted Ukraine’s financial infrastructure, taking banking institutions offline. It wasn’t the engineer’s fault. He had no reason to know that the site was important, and no alternative playbook to follow.
After that incident, we vowed to never let an organization that was serving such an important purpose go offline simply because they couldn’t pay for services. And so the idea for Project Galileo was born."
and now the story is full circle
" At our Project Galileo event, the State Department’s Special Envoy... read an email she’d received from Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister and Chief Digital Transformation officer of Ukraine the night before:
"It is absolutely definite that Cloudflare services provide a vital layer of cybersecurity within the Ukrainian segment of cyberspace..."
Between May 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024, Cloudflare blocked 31.93 billion cyber threats against organizations protected under Project Galileo. This is an average of nearly 95.89 million cyber attacks per day over the 11-month period.
We observed an attack targeting LGBT Foundation, a UK-based LGBTQ+ organization, during the beginning of Pride Month in June 2023. Cloudflare mitigated 144.7 million requests to this organization on June 2, 2023. In addition to this spike in June, we also saw another attack on August 26, 2023, which coincided with Manchester Pride. This second attack peaked at 1.46 million requests per second before finally subsiding on August 29.
More data here: https://lnkd.in/gvszmRcC
And yes, I'm hiring! Join us
Ten years ago today, Cloudflare launched Project Galileo, a program which today provides security services, at no cost, to more than 2,600 independent journalists and nonprofit organizations around the world supporting human rights, democracy, and local communities.
We continue to believe the single, global Internet is a miracle that we should all be fighting for.
Even if we are at a moment of democratic decline, continuing to defend the open, interoperable Internet preserves space and capacity for a future in which the Internet can also fuel greater freedom. https://cfl.re/3yTz7I6
Here's the link to the news: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/