The challenge of manual response

Security teams know all too well the grind of manual investigations and remediation. With the mass adoption of AI and increasingly automated attacks, defenders cannot afford to rely on overly manual, low priority, and complex workflows.

Heavily burdensome manual response introduces delays as analysts bounce between consoles and high alert volumes, contributing to alert fatigue. Even worse, it prevents security teams from dedicating time to high-priority threats and strategic, innovative work. To keep pace, SOCs need automated responses that contain and remediate common threats at machine speed before they become business-impacting incidents.

That’s why today, we’re excited to announce a new integration between the Cloudflare One platform and CrowdStrike's Falcon® Fusion SOAR.

As part of our ongoing partnership with CrowdStrike, this integration introduces two out-of-the-box integrations for Zero Trust and Email Security designed for organizations already leveraging CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR or CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM.

This allows SOC teams to gain powerful new capabilities to stop phishing, malware, and suspicious behavior faster, with less manual effort.

Although teams can always create custom automations, we’ve made it simple to get started with two pre-built integrations focused on Zero Trust Access and Email Security. Both follow the same general structure and are available directly in the CrowdStrike Content Library.

Cloudflare within CrowdStrike Content Library

The actions you can take within CrowdStrike from these integrations are the following:

Using these signals, customers can create automated workflows that run with minimal to no human intervention. Falcon Fusion SOAR’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to chain together Cloudflare actions with other signals (from CrowdStrike or even third-party vendors) to automate large portions of the SOC workflow.

An example flow that you could create is: 

1. A phishing email is detected by Cloudflare Email Security.

2. Falcon Fusion SOAR automatically retrieves detection details, blocks the sender, and updates allow/deny lists.

3. Cloudflare Zero Trust revokes active session tokens for the impacted account.

4. If Falcon confirms the endpoint is compromised, the device is automatically isolated.

Another example of how a workflow like above would show in the UI is the following:  

An example automated flow using Cloudflare

From the Cloudflare UI, customers can navigate to the Logpush section where they can set up a job with CrowdStrike. To do this customers need to create a job with “HTTP destination”:

From here, customers can input the HTTP endpoint provided by CrowdStrike in the data connector setup to start sending logs over to Falcon Fusion SOAR. This URL will show up in the following way: ingest.us-2.crowdstrike.com/api/ingest/hec/<CRWDconnectionID>/v1/services/collector/raw

CrowdStrike URL Location

Working Logpush to CrowdStrike

This end-to-end automation allows teams to reduce mean time-to-response from minutes to seconds.

At a technical level, the integration relies on webhook and API integrations between Cloudflare’s SASE platform and CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR. For example:

• From endpoint to network: When the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform detects an endpoint compromise, it triggers a workflow to Cloudflare’s API, which enforces step-up authentication or session revocation across SaaS, private apps, or email access. This is done via Cloudflare’s Access product. 

• From network to endpoint: When Cloudflare flags suspicious behavior (e.g., abnormal login patterns, anomalous traffic, or unsafe email activity), it notifies CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR, which then isolates the device and launches remediation playbooks.

This bidirectional exchange makes sure threats are contained from both sides, endpoint and network, without requiring manual intervention from analysts.

If your organization already uses CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR with Cloudflare’s SASE platform, you can enable these workflows today directly from the Cloudflare Dashboard and CrowdStrike Falcon console (Zero Trust, Email Security). You can also search for Cloudflare within the content library in CrowdStrike to find the integrations. 

For organizations looking to customize further, both platforms allow extensibility through APIs and custom playbooks so SOC teams can tailor response actions to their unique risk posture.

To learn more about our integrations, feel free to reach out to us to get started with a consultation.

For many organizations, it is becoming increasingly challenging and inefficient to adapt to risks across their growing attack surface. In particular, security teams struggle with multiple siloed tools that fail to share risk data effectively with each other, leading to excessive manual effort to extract signals from the noise. To address this complexity, Cloudflare launched risk posture management capabilities earlier this year to make it easier for organizations to accomplish three key jobs on one platform:

1. Evaluating risk posed by people by using first-party user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) models

2. Exchanging risk telemetry with best-in-class security tools, and

3. Enforcing risk controls based on those dynamic first- and third-party risk scores.

Today’s announcement builds on these capabilities (particularly job #2) and our partnership with Okta by enabling organizations to share Cloudflare’s real-time user risk scores with Okta, which can then automatically enforce policies based on that user’s risk. In this way, organizations can adapt to evolving risks in less time with less manual effort.

Introduced earlier this year, Cloudflare’s user risk scoring analyzes real-time telemetry of user activities and behaviors and assigns a risk score of high, medium, or low. For example, if Cloudflare detects risky or suspicious activity from a user — such as impossible travel, where a user logs in from multiple geographically dispersed locations within a short time frame, data loss prevention (DLP) detections, or endpoint detections suggesting that the device is infected — the user’s risk score will increase. The activity leading to that scoring is logged for analysis.

Cloudflare includes predefined risk behaviors to help you get started. Administrators can create policies based on specific risk behaviors and adjust the risk level for each behavior based on their company’s tolerance.

Customers that opt in to this new integration will be able to share continually updated Cloudflare user risk scores with Identity Threat Protection with Okta AI. If a user is deemed too risky, Okta will automatically take action to mitigate the risk, such as enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) verification or universally logging the user out from all applications. 

For example, a user has a low risk score from Cloudflare that was shared with Okta, but after exhibiting “impossible travel” behavior, the user’s risk level is raised to high. Cloudflare sends the updated score to Okta, which triggers a Universal Logout and an MFA challenge if the user attempts to log in again. Access to sensitive systems may be revoked completely until the user is verified. 

^{Figure 1. Diagram showing risky behavior by a user, resulting in sign-out.}

We begin by detecting risky behavior from a user (such as an “impossible travel” event between two geographic locations). Instances of risky behavior are called Risk Events. We perform two actions when we observe a Risk Event: logging the event and evaluating whether further action is required. For customers that have enabled Risk Score Sharing with Okta, any change in Risk Score is transmitted to Okta’s Identity Threat Protection (ITP).

Upon receiving a new event, Okta evaluates the change in user risk against the organization's policies. These policies may include actions such as re-authenticating the user if they become high risk.

When we design new features, we aim for them to be extensible across the industry. For this reason, we chose the OpenID Shared Signals Framework Specification (SSF) to be the foundation of our transmission format. By doing this, we are able to leverage current and future providers that support the standard. The core functionality of SSF revolves around sharing Security Event Tokens (SETs), a specialized version of a JSON Web Token (JWT). Providers can produce and consume Security Event Tokens, forming a “network” of shared user risk information between providers.

^{Figure 2. Diagram showing a Security Event Token being transmitted from Cloudflare to Okta.}

The diagram above (Figure 2) details the process of sharing risk. When sharing Risk Score changes with Okta, we bundle metadata about the risk event and user into the body of a Security Event Token. Following this, the JWT/SET is signed using our private key. This is an important step, as the signature is used to verify the sender's identity (cryptographic authenticity) and that the payload body has not been tampered with (cryptographic integrity). In plain terms, this signature is used by Okta to verify that the event is unaltered and was sent by Cloudflare.

Once Okta has verified the authenticity and integrity of the SET token, they may use the risk metadata within the body to execute Identity Threat Protection policies defined by the customer. These policies could include actions such as “if a high risk score is received from Cloudflare, sign out the offending user”.

Learn more about the Shared Signals Framework and CAEP in Okta’s announcement blog post.

Cloudflare customers can easily enable risk score sharing from the Cloudflare One SSO setup page. This is available to customers whether you’ve already integrated with Okta or are setting up the integration for the first time. You will also be able to confirm that the feature was enabled in your audit logs.

If you’ve already integrated Okta within your Cloudflare One dashboard:

1. As an admin, navigate to Settings > Authentication and select the Okta login method.

2. Select “send risk score to Okta.”

If you haven’t yet integrated Okta within your Cloudflare One dashboard:

1. As an admin, navigate to Settings > Authentication and select a new login method.

2. Follow the instructions to add Okta as an SSO.

3. Select “send risk score to Okta.”

Now, whenever a user’s risk score changes within the organization, information is sent to Okta automatically and an audit log is documented.

In conclusion, the ability to incorporate rich context is essential for making accurate and informed access decisions. With vast amounts of data — including user logins, logouts, websites visited, and emails sent — human analysts would struggle to keep pace with modern security challenges. Cloudflare provides context in the form of a risk score, enabling Okta’s risk engine to make more informed policy decisions about users. This sharing of information powers the continuous evaluation required to enforce Zero Trust policies within your organization, ultimately strengthening your organization’s security posture.

Not yet a Cloudflare One customer? Reach out for a consultation or contact your account manager.

This post explains how Falcon Next-Gen SIEM allows customers to identify and investigate risky user behavior and analyze data combined with other log sources to uncover hidden threats. By combining Cloudflare and CrowdStrike, organizations are better equipped to manage risk and decisively take action to stop cyberattacks.

By leveraging the combined capabilities of Cloudflare and CrowdStrike, organizations combine Cloudflare’s email security and zero trust logging capabilities with CrowdStrike’s dashboards and custom workflows to get better visibility into their environments and remediate potential threats. Happy Cog, a full-service digital agency, currently leverages the integration. Co-Founder and President Matthew Weinberg said:

'The integration of Cloudflare’s robust Zero Trust capabilities with CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM enables organizations to gain a more comprehensive view of the threat landscape and take action to mitigate both internal and external risks posed by today’s security challenges.'

With Cloudflare Email Security’s configurable policies, organizations can now push indicators of compromise (IoC) alerts to Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, notifying analysts about suspicious activity, such as a user engaging with a phishing email. By proactively alerting analysts when suspicious activity is detected, Cloudflare and CrowdStrike can provide early detection of account compromises or insider threats.

We are also integrating Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. This allows our mutual customers to push Cloudflare Zero Trust logs from Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway to Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for better visualization, analysis, and remediation. This integration allows Cloudflare logs to be used to customize and enhance Falcon Next-Gen SIEM detections and trigger CrowdStrike workflows to automatically configure a response action. An example workflow: based on a new detection of a user’s access request being deemed fraudulent, or if a user is engaging with risky websites, the Falcon platform can trigger Cloudflare to move users to affected user groups and apply adaptive access control policies, such as access isolating or quarantining the user.

To connect Cloudflare Zero Trust logs, start with the Falcon Next-Gen SIEM module. Navigate to the Data Connectors tab of your Falcon Next-Gen SIEM dashboard and select the Cloudflare Data Connector.

Give the connector a name and select “Save”, and you will receive two pieces of information: an API key and an API URL. Be sure to make note of the key, as it will only be shown once.

Next, in Cloudflare, create an HTTP logpush job via API, and format the "destination_conf" field as follows:

"destination_conf": "<API URL>?header_Authorization=Bearer%20<API KEY>&tags=<ZONE>,dataset:<DATASET>"

Note: 

• <ZONE> is optional for account-level logpush jobs 

• <DATASET> follows a dot delimited syntax, so http_requests becomes http.requests

Once the job is created and active, you will start to see events populating in the My Connectors section of your Falcon dashboard. Once Cloudflare data is populated in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, you can now search events and create Falcon Fusion SOAR automation workflows and correlation rules, all based on Cloudflare log events.

Together, CrowdStrike and Cloudflare’s shared telemetry will further decrease the mean time to containment and expedite any organization’s ability to decisively respond to risks within their environment. The two platforms work together as one, allowing organizations to block suspicious activity and deliver high-fidelity alerts to security analysts for further investigation.

To learn more about these integrations, feel free to reach out to us to get started with a consultation. We can discuss your existing environment and ensure that you are best equipped to achieve better visibility and remediation in the face of emerging threats.

Managing risk posture — how your business assesses, prioritizes, and mitigates risks — has never been easy. But as attack surfaces continue to expand rapidly, doing that job has become increasingly complex and inefficient. (One global survey found that SOC team members spend, on average, one-third of their workday on incidents that pose no threat).  

But what if you could mitigate risk with less effort and less noise?

This post explores how Cloudflare can help customers do that, thanks to a new suite that converges capabilities across our Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) and web application and API (WAAP) security portfolios. We’ll explain:

• Why this approach helps protect more of your attack surface, while also reducing SecOps effort

• Three key use cases — including enforcing Zero Trust with our expanded CrowdStrike partnership

Today, we’re announcing Cloudflare for Unified Risk Posture, a new suite of cybersecurity risk management capabilities that can help enterprises with automated and dynamic risk posture enforcement across their expanding attack surface. Today, one unified platform enables organizations to:

• Evaluate risk across people and applications: Cloudflare evaluates risk posed by people via user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) models and risks to apps, APIs, and sites via malicious payload, zero-day threat, and bot detection models.

• Exchange risk indicators with best-in-class partners: Cloudflare ingests risk scores from best-in-class endpoint protection (EPP) and identity provider (IDP) partners and shares telemetry back with security information and event management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) platforms for further analysis, all via one-time integrations with our unified API.

• Enforce automated risk controls at scale: Based on these dynamic first- and third-party risk scores, Cloudflare enforces consistent risk controls for people and apps across any location around the world.

Figure 1: Unified Risk Posture Diagram

As mentioned above, this suite converges capabilities from our SASE and WAAP security portfolios onto our global network. Customers can now take advantage of built-in risk management functionality packaged as part of these existing portfolios.

This launch builds on our progressive efforts to extend first-party visibility and controls and third-party integrations that make it easier for organizations to adapt to evolving risks. For example, as part of the 2024 Security Week, we announced the general availability of behavior-based user risk scoring and the beta availability of an AI-enabled assistant to help you analyze risks facing your applications. And in a recent integration in the Fall of 2023, we announced that our cloud email security customers can ingest and display our threat detections within the CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM dashboard.

To further manage your risk posture, you will be able to take advantage of new Cloudflare capabilities and integrations, including:

• A new integration to share Cloudflare Zero Trust and email log data with the CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM (available now)

• A new integration to share Cloudflare’s user risk score with Okta to enforce access policies (coming by the end of Q2 2024)

• New first-party UEBA models, including user risk scores based on device posture checks (coming by the end of Q2 2024)

Unifying the evaluation, exchange, and enforcement stages of risk management onto Cloudflare’s platform helps security leaders mitigate risk with less effort. As a cybersecurity vendor defending both public-facing and internal infrastructure, Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to protect wide swathes of your expanding attack surface. Bringing together dynamic first-party risk scoring, flexible integrations, and automated enforcement helps drive two primary business outcomes:

1. Reducing effort in SecOps with less manual policy building and greater agility in responding to incidents. This means fewer clicks to build policies, more automated workflows, and lower mean times to detect (MTTD) and mean times to respond (MTTR) to incidents.

2. Reducing cyber risk with visibility and controls that span people and apps. This means fewer critical incidents and more threats blocked automatically.

Customers like Indeed, the #1 job site in the world, are already seeing these impacts by partnering with Cloudflare:

“Cloudflare is helping us mitigate risk more effectively with less effort and simplifies how we deliver Zero Trust across my organization.”— Anthony Moisant, SVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer at Indeed.

Managing risk posture is an inherently broad challenge, covering internal dangers and external threats across attack vectors. Below is just a sampling of risk factors CISOs and their security teams track across three everyday dimensions including people, apps, and data:

• People risks: Phishing, social engineering, malware, ransomware, remote access, insider threats, physical access compromise, third party / supply chain, mobile devices / BYOD

• App risks: denial of service, zero-day exploits, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, remote code execution, credential stuffing, account takeover, shadow IT usage, API abuse

• Data risks: data loss / exposure, data theft / breach, privacy violation, compliance violation, data tampering

Point solutions emerged to lock down some of these specific risks and attack vectors. But over time, organizations have accumulated many services with a limited ability to talk to one another and build a more holistic view of risk. The granular telemetry generated by each tool has led to information overload for security staff who are often stretched thin already. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Extended Detection & Response (XDR) platforms play a critical role in aggregating risk data across environments and mitigating threats based on analysis, but these tools still demand time, resources, and expertise to operate effectively. All these challenges have gotten worse as attack surfaces have expanded rapidly, as businesses embrace hybrid work, build new digital apps, and more recently, experiment with AI.

To help restore control over this complexity, Cloudflare for Unified Risk Posture provides one platform to evaluate risk, exchange indicators, and enforce dynamic controls throughout IT environments and around the world, all while complementing the security tools your business already relies on.

Although the specific risks Cloudflare can mitigate are wide-ranging (including all those in the sample bullets above), the following three use cases represent the full range of our capabilities, which you can start taking advantage of today.

This first use case spotlights the flexibility with which Cloudflare fits into your current security ecosystem to make it easier to adopt Zero Trust best practices.

Cloudflare integrates with and ingests security signals from best-in-class EPP and IDP partners to enforce identity and device posture checks for any access request to any destination. You can even onboard multiple providers at once to enforce different policies in different contexts. For example, by integrating with CrowdStrike Falcon®, joint customers can enforce policies based on the Falcon Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA) score, which delivers continuous real-time security posture assessments across all endpoints in an organization regardless of the location, network or user. Plus, customers can then push activity logs generated by Cloudflare, including all access requests, to whichever cloud storage or analytics providers they prefer.

Today, we are announcing an expanded partnership with CrowdStrike for a new integration that enables organizations to share logs with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for deeper analysis and further investigation. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM unifies first- and third-party data, native threat intelligence, AI, and workflow automation to drive SOC transformation and enforce better threat protection. The integration of Cloudflare Zero Trust and email logs with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM allows joint customers to identify and investigate Zero Trust networking and email risks and analyze data with other log sources to uncover hidden threats.

“CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM delivers up to 150x faster search performance over legacy SIEMs and products positioned as SIEM alternatives. Our transformative telemetry, paired with Cloudflare’s robust Zero Trust capabilities provides an unprecedented partnership. Together, we are converging two of the most critical pieces of the risk management puzzle that organizations of every size must address in order to combat today’s growing threats.”— Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike

Below is a sample workflow of how Cloudflare and CrowdStrike work together to enforce Zero Trust policies and mitigate emerging risks. Together, Cloudflare and CrowdStrike complement each other by exchanging activity and risk data and enforcing risk-based policies and remediation steps.

Figure 2: Enforce Zero Trust with Cloudflare & CrowdStrike

This next use case is focused on protecting apps, APIs, and websites from threat actors and bots. Many customers first adopt Cloudflare for this use case, but may not be aware of the risk evaluation algorithms underpinning their protection.

Figure 3: Protect apps, APIs & sites with ML-backed threat intelligence

Cloudflare’s Application Services detect and mitigate malicious payloads and bots using risk models backed by machine learning (ML) including:

• Our WAF attack score, which scores whether a request contains a zero-day exploit, or common OWASP Top 10 risks such as a SQL injection, cross-site scripting, or remote code execution payload

• Our bot score, which scores the likelihood that a request came from a bot

• Our malicious script classifier, which looks at the dangers of browser scripts for your website visitors

These risk models are trained largely on telemetry from Cloudflare’s global network, which is used as a reverse proxy by nearly 20% of all websites and sees about 3 trillion DNS queries per day. This unique real-time visibility powers threat intelligence and even enables us to detect and mitigate zero-days before others.

Cloudflare also uses ML to discover new API endpoints and schemas without requiring any prerequisite customer input. This helps organizations uncover unauthenticated APIs and map their growing attack surface before applying protections.

Unlike other vendors, Cloudflare’s network architecture enables risk evaluation models and security controls on public-facing and internal infrastructure to be shared across all of our services. This means that organizations can apply protections against app vulnerability exploits, DDoS, and bots in front of internal apps like self-hosted Jira and Confluence servers, protecting them from emerging and even zero-day threats.

Organizations can review the potential misconfigurations, data leakage risks, and vulnerabilities that impact the risk posture for their apps, APIs, and websites within Cloudflare Security Center. We are investing in this centralized view of risk posture management by integrating alerts and insights across our security portfolio. In fact, we recently announced updates focused on highlighting where gaps exist in how your organization has deployed Cloudflare services.

Finally, we are also making it easier for organizations to investigate security events directly and recently announced beta availability of Log Explorer. In this beta, security teams can view all of their HTTP traffic in one place with search, analytics dashboards, and filters built-in. These capabilities can help customers monitor more risk factors within the Cloudflare platform versus exporting to third party tools.

This third use case summarizes one common way many customers plan to leverage our user risk / UEBA scores to prevent leaks and mishandling of sensitive data:

Figure 4: Protect apps, APIs & sites with ML-backed threat intelligence

• Phase 1: In this example, the security team has already configured data loss prevention (DLP) policies to detect and block traffic with sensitive data. These policies prevent one user’s multiple, repeated attempts to upload source code to a public GitHub repository.

• Phase 2: Because this user has now violated a high number of DLP policies within a short time frame, Cloudflare scores that suspicious user as high risk, regardless of whether those uploads had malicious or benign intent. The security team can now further investigate that specific user, including reviewing all of his recent log activity.

• Phase 3: For that specific high-risk user or for a group of high-risk users, administrators can then set ZTNA or even browser isolation rules to block or isolate access to applications that contain other sensitive data.

Altogether, this workflow highlights how Cloudflare’s risk posture controls adapt to suspicious behavior from evaluation through to enforcement.

The above use cases reflect how our customers are unifying risk management with Cloudflare. Through these customer conversations, a few themes emerged for why they feel confident in our vision to help them manage risk across their expanding attack surface:

• The simplicity of our unified platform: We bring together SASE and WAAP risk scoring and controls for people and apps. Plus, with a single API for all Cloudflare services, organizations can automate and customize workflows with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform with ease.

• The flexibility of our integrations: We exchange risk signals with the EPP, IDP, XDR, and SIEM providers you already use, so you can do more with your tools and data. Plus, with one-time integrations that work across all our services, you can extend controls across your IT environments with agility.

• The scale of our global network: Every security service is available for customers to run in every location across our network spanning 320+ locations and 13K+ interconnects. In this way, single-pass inspection and risk policy enforcement is always fast, consistent, and resilient, delivered close to your users and apps.

If you’re ready to see how Cloudflare can help you manage risk, request a consultation today. Or if you’re at RSA Conference 2024, come to any of our in-person events.

To continue learning more about how Cloudflare can help you evaluate risk, exchange risk indicators, and enforce risk controls, explore more resources on our website.

Today, we are thrilled to announce new Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboards on Elastic. Shared customers using Elastic can now use these pre-built dashboards to store, search, and analyze their Zero Trust logs.

When organizations look to adopt a Zero Trust architecture, there are many components to get right. If products are configured incorrectly, used maliciously, or security is somehow breached during the process, it can open your organization to underlying security risks without the ability to get insight from your data quickly and efficiently.

As a Cloudflare technology partner, Elastic helps Cloudflare customers find what they need faster, while keeping applications running smoothly and protecting against cyber threats. “I'm pleased to share our collaboration with Cloudflare, making it even easier to deploy log and analytics dashboards. This partnership combines Elastic's open approach with Cloudflare's practical solutions, offering straightforward tools for enterprise search, observability, and security deployment,” explained Mark Dodds, Chief Revenue Officer at Elastic.

With this joint solution, we’ve made it easy for customers to seamlessly forward their Zero Trust logs to Elastic via Logpush jobs. This can be achieved directly via a Restful API or through an intermediary storage solution like AWS S3 or Google Cloud. Additionally, Cloudflare's integration with Elastic has undergone improvements to encompass all categories of Zero Trust logs generated by Cloudflare.

Here are detailed some highlights of what the integration offers:

• Comprehensive Visibility: Integrating Cloudflare Logpush into Elastic provides organizations with a real-time, comprehensive view of events related to Zero Trust. This enables a detailed understanding of who is accessing resources and applications, from where, and at what times. Enhanced visibility helps detect anomalous behavior and potential security threats more effectively, allowing for early response and mitigation.

• Field Normalization: By unifying data from Zero Trust logs in Elastic, it's possible to apply consistent field normalization not only for Zero Trust logs but also for other sources. This simplifies the process of search and analysis, as data is presented in a uniform format. Normalization also facilitates the creation of alerts and the identification of patterns of malicious or unusual activity.

• Efficient Search and Analysis: Elastic provides powerful data search and analysis capabilities. Having Zero Trust logs in Elastic enables quick and precise searching for specific information. This is crucial for investigating security incidents, understanding workflows, and making informed decisions.

• Correlation and Threat Detection: By combining Zero Trust data with other security events and data, Elastic enables deeper and more effective correlation. This is essential for detecting threats that might go unnoticed when analyzing each data source separately. Correlation aids in pattern identification and the detection of sophisticated attacks.

• Prebuilt Dashboards: The integration provides out-of-the-box dashboards offering a quick start to visualizing key metrics and patterns. These dashboards help security teams visualize the security landscape in a clear and concise manner. The integration not only provides the advantage of prebuilt dashboards designed for Zero Trust datasets but also empowers users to curate their own visualizations.

One of the main assets of the integration is the out-of-the-box dashboards tailored specifically for each type of Zero Trust log. Let's explore some of these dashboards in more detail to find out how they can help us in terms of visibility.

This dashboard focuses on HTTP traffic and allows for monitoring and analyzing HTTP requests passing through Cloudflare's Secure Web Gateway.

Here, patterns of traffic can be identified, potential threats detected, and a better understanding gained of how resources are being used within the network.

Every visualization in the stage is interactive. Therefore, the whole dashboard adapts to enabled filters, and they can be pinned across dashboards for pivoting. For instance, if clicking on one of the sections of the donut showing the different actions, a filter is automatically applied on that value and the whole dashboard is oriented around it.

Following with a different perspective, the CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) dashboard provides visibility over cloud applications used by users. Its visualizations are targeted to detect threats effectively, helping in the risk management and regulatory compliance.

These examples illustrate how dashboards in the integration between Cloudflare and Elastic offer practical and effective data visualization for Zero Trust. They enable us to make data-driven decisions, identify behavioral patterns, and proactively respond to threats. By providing relevant information in a visual and accessible manner, these dashboards strengthen security posture and allow for more efficient risk management in the Zero Trust environment.

Setup and deployment is simple. Use the Cloudflare dashboard or API to create Logpush jobs with all fields enabled for each dataset you’d like to ingest on Elastic. There are eight account-scoped datasets available to use today (Access Requests, Audit logs, CASB findings, Gateway logs including DNS, Network, HTTP; Zero Trust Session Logs) that can be ingested into Elastic.

Setup Logpush jobs to your Elastic destination via one of the following methods:

• HTTP Endpoint mode - Cloudflare pushes logs directly to an HTTP endpoint hosted by your Elastic Agent.

• AWS S3 polling mode - Cloudflare writes data to S3 and Elastic Agent polls the S3 bucket by listing its contents and reading new files.

• AWS S3 SQS mode - Cloudflare writes data to S3, S3 pushes a new object notification to SQS, Elastic Agent receives the notification from SQS, and then reads the S3 object. Multiple Agents can be used in this mode.

1. In Kibana, go to Management > Integrations

2. In the integrations search bar type Cloudflare Logpush.

3. Click the Cloudflare Logpush integration from the search results.

4. Click the Add Cloudflare Logpush button to add Cloudflare Logpush integration.

5. Enable the Integration with the HTTP Endpoint, AWS S3 input or GCS input.

6. Under the AWS S3 input, there are two types of inputs: using AWS S3 Bucket or using SQS.

7. Configure Cloudflare to send logs to the Elastic Agent.

As organizations increasingly adopt a Zero Trust architecture, understanding your organization’s security posture is paramount. The dashboards help with necessary tools to build a robust security strategy, centered around visibility, early detection, and effective threat response.  By unifying data, normalizing fields, facilitating search, and enabling the creation of custom dashboards, this integration becomes a valuable asset for any cybersecurity team aiming to strengthen their security posture.

We’re looking forward to continuing to connect Cloudflare customers with our community of technology partners, to help in the adoption of a Zero Trust architecture.

Explore this new integration today.