Cloudflare is a widely respected, international organization which provides a free, state-of-the-art security and content delivery service that protects your website from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, malicious bots, and other nefarious intrusions; speeds up delivery of content from your site to your web visitors; and provides SSL certificate encryption for your entire site, among many other benefits. They also monitor threats in real time and will adjust overall security rules to stop ‘Zero Day’ threats as soon as they appear. Cloudflare currently powers over 19% of Fortune 1,000 companies’ internet traffic.
Why?
Websites around the world have been the target of increased nefarious hack attempts, in particular WordPress websites, more info here:
These attempts appear to be coordinated efforts by international criminal groups trying to take over websites for ransomware schemes or other criminal purposes. In December 2021, WordPress servers worldwide experienced millions of malicious attempts, most of them ‘brute force’ attempts to login to admin areas using user ids and passwords found on the dark web, or login ids such as ‘admin’, or the name of websites (e.g. namilee or namiskc). Hackers are targeting medical and social services websites in particular, because their mission critical nature results in more ransoms being paid.
Because of our existing security, maintenance, and continual monitoring, none of the recent attempts against our own servers were successful. But it sometimes seems like we’re playing ‘Whack-a-Mole’ with hackers. By installing Cloudflare we’ll be able to add better and more automated protection, which will allow our team more time to spend on developing new features for you.
Using Cloudflare will not impact your current site’s functionality, but it will help us prevent your site from getting hacked.