Cloudflare CDN Critical Vulnerability in 2021
Tue Jun 14 2022
RyotaK announced it discovered a fatal vulnerability in the CDNJS service - An open source CDN system powered by Cloudflare in April 2021.
Using a CDN system brings a lot of benefits to businesses, but it also makes us "delicious" targets for hackers. In April 2021, a cybersecurity expert known as RyotaK discovered a bug on Cloudflare CDN's system and reported it to the company under the framework of the vulnerability detection support program. your privacy - which is completely normal.
The problems became very serious when the security flaw in the CDN system that RyotaK discovered was capable of affecting 13% of websites globally, along with countless online stores and billions of dollars. e-commerce customers.
But how can a small security hole cause such great harm? Let's find out in the article below.
CDN - The most reliable transmission solution on the Internet
CDN - Content Delivery Network is a system of interconnected servers that deliver content to users quickly. Businesses use the CDN system on their websites by copying and storing their content on CDN servers in different locations, and then transmitting the content to searchers through the server. The nearest PoP.
The main goal of the CDN system is to avoid the congestion that occurs when too many users try to access the content stored in only one location at a time, thereby reducing latency, increasing speed. load the page and bring satisfaction to the user.
The most notable utilities of the CDN . system
Increase website loading speed: Thanks to the content being delivered to the CDN server system in advance, the page and content load speed to users will be faster, thereby helping to reduce the bounce rate on the website. pages and increase the time customers stay on your website.
Reduce the cost of using bandwidth for businesses: The cost of bandwidth accounts for a large part of the total cost of maintaining and operating the enterprise's website. By pre-caching content and using specific optimization methods, a CDN system reduces the amount of bandwidth that the enterprise origin server system has to bear.
Variety of useful content for users: Minimize the possibility of data loss due to the enterprise's original server system malfunction. The distributed nature of CDN systems makes them less likely to be downed than most origin server systems due to technical failures such as traffic overflow or hardware failure.
**Improve user experience on the website:**Fast page loading speed along with high availability of business website definitely bring user satisfaction, increase user experience on website and thereby bringing the loyalty of potential customers.
Lessons from Cloudflare's security story and website security story for digital businesses
In a research paper published by RyotaK on his website in April 2021, he said he had discovered a fatal vulnerability in the CDNJS service - An open source CDN system supported by Cloudflare and other communities. related copper. Through this vulnerability, RyotaK was able to explore all the data stores stored in the CDNJS system and discovered a method to fool CDN servers and insert malicious code directly into the system.
The most serious problem of this bug is the impact it brings when being exploited by hackers. CDN systems have become the target of attacks by hacker groups with the aim of causing far-reaching consequences on many websites, online stores and customers operating in the system. In the case of CDNJS, this CDN system is serving millions of websites with more than 4000 publicly hosted JavaScript and CSS file collections.
Just 1 hacker discovered this security hole before RyotaK, more than 1/7 websites are active globally and their data has the potential to be stolen and used for malicious purposes is huge. .
Before businesses choose for themselves a CDN service provider, please read and study the features in the CDN system below about security and protection against malicious attacks. From there, you can make the right choice for your business:
- Load Balancing Local and Global server systems: Helps expand traffic to servers with spikes in traffic by distributing data streams evenly across the server connection network
- Machine Learning feature: Websites are automatically cached efficiently and reduce bandwidth usage Dynamic and static content delivery: Improves connection and response speeds, while reducing bandwidth usage
- DDoS protection: Allows CDN servers to intercept/deliver traffic in the presence of denial of service attacks
- Smart navigation feature: Automatically redirect traffic to other CDN servers when there is a problem with one CDN server in the system
- Compress and lighten files: Reduce the amount of data transferred on the CDN system.
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