Yeah I'm sure one day it will transpire Cloudflare is affliated with intelligence agencies too. The solution to a "sudden DDoS" is to put their website behind Cloudflare. Wonder who can do those sudden attacks?

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sph 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s been my pet theory from day 1, and not because of DDoS. Simply because they are the SSL terminator for most of the internet and can see anything going on in cleartext (and I’ve seen them protecting some shady stuff)

I recall a PRISM slide showing the diagram of Google and the public internet, with a big arrow on GFE saying, quote, “SSL added and removed here! :-)”

If NSA aren’t installed at Cloudflare, I wonder what they are even doing.

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tanh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DDoS is just one of the impetuses for a service provider be MiTM'd

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linkregister 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's within the realm of possibility that NSA is collecting data with Cloudflare's consent. It seems unlikely that Cloudflare would jeopardize their entire business model over it. Unlike other companies in the leaked NSA slides that participated in PRISM, Cloudflare would face a near-total loss of customers. Their entire value proposition is being an unobtrusive traffic intermediary.

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fph an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Within the realm of possibility? Let's be honest, if you are a top NSA executive and you couldn't find a way to get your hands on Cloudflare's private keys (bribing or threatening the right person), you are not getting your Christmas bonus.

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nly 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It is of course inconceivable that the NSA do not have the private keys for dozens of browser trusted certificate authorities

That nonetheless doesn't help them unless they are doing active MITM. In order to do that they'd have to have at least some physical presence at Cloudflare or on the path to Cloudflare.

	▲	RealityVoid 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My understanding is that they tapped communication nodes before. I would be surprised if they can't tap the pipes to cloudflare.

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linkregister 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Is this information derived from Enemy of the State starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman? It was a great movie and the first DVD I ever bought.

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sph 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Unlike other companies in the leaked NSA slides that participated in PRISM, Cloudflare would face a near-total loss of customers

People didn’t care when they learned about PRISM, why would they care now when it’s a known fact? The sane stance would be to assume Cloudflare is in cahoots with NSA.

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linkregister an hour ago | parent [-]

All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits. The NSA leaks were a forcing function that led to a massive uptake of encryption. Up until that point it was common for websites to support only HTTP.

The NSA leaks dominated news cycles for the entirety of 2013.

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lukewarm707 an hour ago | parent [-]

my llm api traffic terminates tcp at cloudflare in lovely plain text :/

it does give better peering. reduces latency a bit for me.

	▲	my-next-account 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I had no idea that this was a thing. How can you figure out where SSL turns into plain text on its route to the destination?

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breppp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That slide was about the NSA sitting inside Google data centers without Google's knowledge.

That doesn't mean collusion

	▲	xorcist 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's the thing though: We can't know that.

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hammock 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t see how they couldn’t be. Either on purpose, secretly my coercion, or secretly without their own knowledge. It’s so valuable

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dewey 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Wonder who can do those sudden attacks?

Anyone with a few crypto currencies in their wallet that can click a button on any of the booter services with botnets for hire.

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overfeed 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You are right, they don't have to do it themselves, but guess who's protecting the booters from other booters?

	▲	l23k4 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Primarily specialist bulletproof ddos protection services like ddos-guard.ru, not "Cloudflare" as is the popular meme among clueless commenters.
	▲	linkregister 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Most modern booters are not maintaining public websites that could be the object of DDoS attacks. They're renting residential IP addresses from free VPN users.

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kdheiwns 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, their origin is a story of absolute incredible luck. Cloudflare came out of nowhere and suddenly massive sites with huge user bases around the world, including places like 4chan, were getting DDoSed. Then they immediately announce that they transitioned to Cloudflare. Hell of a lucky time to make a company that the entire internet suddenly became absolutely dependent on.

The funny thing about that era is you knew they started using Cloudflare because they went from stable with constant uptime to going down and showing a Cloudflare banner randomly all the time for a good year or so. They ran worse with Cloudflare than they did while they were allegedly getting DDoSed. The whole company glows, as the late great HN commenter Terry Davis would've said.

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UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Am i the only one that actually remembers this time period? It wasn’t that long ago. The confidence of your assertion is completely misplaced. I remember exactly where i was when I first read about CF, on launch day. DDoS attacks were CERTAINLY a big issue before Cloudflare came along. A whole lot of script kiddie energy was poured into them. LHC? Slowloris? IRC C2? This wasn’t niche stuff. That’s why I remember the CF launch, because I and everyone else knew that it was a big deal, given what the landscape had been for quite some time. Sorry if you personally didn’t have your finger on the pulse for whatever reason, but this was far from a niche issue, even for big sites / usual targets like 4chan.

	▲	kdheiwns an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I was there and recalled there being occasional script kiddy DDoS attacks here and there. But the uptime when being attacked was still much, much better than the first 1-2 years of actually using Cloudflare.