Cloudflare partners with federal agencies on early warning intelligence for financial institutions

On Thursday, Cloudflare announced it would be partnering with the U.S. Department of Treasury and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to improve cyber resilience for the financial services industry.

The partnership will make available an advanced threat intelligence feed through Cloudflare. Financial services institutions using the Cloudflare Gateway will have privileged access to Custom Indicator Feeds that share threat indicators and enable the institutions to take direct action to better defend against ransomware, phishing and other threats.

“The bank heists we watch in movies have modernized. With an increase in consumer banking done online post-pandemic, and the current geopolitical situation, cyberattacks on financial institutions have an outsized impact on how our country functions,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, said. “Our Custom Indicator Feed will take threat intelligence that was previously exclusively the government’s, and make it easily available to and actionable for the private sector for the first time. This is the beginning of another chapter of Cloudflare working closely with the federal government to strengthen the security of our critical institutions.”

Banks and financial services companies are prime targets for cyberattacks, officials said. Cloudflare observed 41 billion HTTP DDoS attack requests targeting the banking, financial services and insurance industry in the first quarter of 2024, officials said, a 57 percent increase over the same time last year. Sharing threat intel data across organization previously was a manual process. The new partnership will provide U.S. financial services institutions with advanced insights from federal sources delivered through direct feeds.

“Treasury sees Cloudflare and PNNL as critical partners in our strategy to develop a more modern proactive defense posture,” Todd Conklin, Treasury Chief AI Officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection, said. “Ensuring that critical cyber threat data is automated and being directly offered to firms will bolster the collective defenses of the financial sector, and will especially offer critical support to our smallest financial institutions.”

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