Internet Threat Radar – The Current Cyber Threat Landscape

John Engates, Field CTO at Cloudflare and former 18-year CTO of Rackspace, surveys the threat landscape Cloudflare observes across its global network, which handles roughly a fifth of the web's traffic. He covers phishing, still the primary compromise vector, driven by deceptive links and newly registered domains used within minutes of registration, machine learning's growing role in classifying zero-days before signatures exist, and the explosion of unsecured API traffic, now 58 percent of Cloudflare's network volume. He details a sophisticated credential-phishing attack against Cloudflare itself, defeated only because employees used hardware-key MFA, and argues boards are now demanding cybersecurity updates as SEC disclosure rules tighten. He runs through current attack tactics including pro-Russian hacktivist DDoS campaigns, DNS laundering, Mitel-based amplification attacks, and increasingly powerful botnets built from hijacked cloud VPS capacity rather than home IoT devices. He closes on generative AI cutting both ways, sharpening phishing and deepfakes for attackers while helping defenders, plus predictions for 2024: more destructive and state-sponsored attacks, quantum-safe encryption, and passwordless authentication.