Cloudflare bot blocking

To tackle the challenge of unwanted bot traffic, here are the detailed steps for leveraging Cloudflare’s bot blocking capabilities. This isn’t just about flip-a-switch solutions.

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It’s about understanding the mechanics and applying targeted strategies to optimize your web presence and ensure legitimate users get the best experience, while the digital noise is filtered out.

Think of it as a strategic defense plan for your digital real estate.

1. Activate Cloudflare’s I’m Under Attack Mode™ Temporarily: For immediate, severe bot attacks, navigate to your Cloudflare dashboard, select your domain, go to “Overview,” and toggle on “I’m Under Attack Mode™.” This will present an interstitial page to visitors, performing additional security checks. Use this sparingly, as it can impact legitimate user experience.
2. Configure Bot Fight Mode: Under the “Security” tab, then “Bots,” you’ll find “Bot Fight Mode.” Enable this to automatically detect and mitigate common bot threats. It uses Cloudflare’s vast network intelligence to identify and challenge suspicious requests.
3. Utilize Managed Challenges: Within the “Security” -> “Bots” section, ensure “Managed Challenges” are enabled. This feature intelligently presents various challenges like CAPTCHAs, JavaScript challenges, or silent proof-of-work to suspicious traffic without blocking legitimate users outright.
4. Create Custom Firewall Rules for Advanced Blocking:
   • Go to “Security” -> “WAF” -> “Firewall rules.”
   • Click “Create a firewall rule.”
   • Define conditions based on known bot behaviors:
     • User-Agent: Block specific, suspicious User-Agent strings e.g., "bad-bot-string".
     • ASN: Block traffic from Autonomous System Numbers ASNs known for malicious activity e.g., ASN equals 12345.
     • Country: If you see attacks originating from specific countries where you have no legitimate traffic, consider blocking them e.g., Country equals "XY".
     • Rate Limiting: Use Firewall Rules in conjunction with Rate Limiting to block IP addresses making too many requests in a short period e.g., http.request.uri.path contains "/login" and cf.threat_score gt 0.
     • Threat Score: Cloudflare assigns a threat score to requests. You can block requests with a high threat score e.g., cf.threat_score gt 10.
   • Set the action to “Block” or “Challenge.”
5. Implement Rate Limiting: Under “Security” -> “Rate Limiting,” create rules to protect specific endpoints e.g., login pages, API endpoints from brute-force attacks or excessive scraping. For instance, If a visitor makes 10 requests to /login within 60 seconds from the same IP, then block for 5 minutes.
6. Leverage Super Bot Fight Mode Enterprise/Business Plans: For Cloudflare Business or Enterprise users, “Super Bot Fight Mode” offers more granular control, including JavaScript Detections, Heuristics, and Machine Learning to identify even sophisticated bots. It provides deeper insights and customizable actions.

The Unseen Battle: Understanding the Cloudflare Bot Blocking Landscape

A significant portion, often over 50%, is comprised of bots – automated programs designed to perform specific tasks.

While some bots are beneficial like search engine crawlers indexing your site, many are malicious, aiming to scrape content, launch DDoS attacks, compromise accounts, or exploit vulnerabilities.

Cloudflare stands as a formidable shield in this unseen battle, offering a robust suite of tools to identify, challenge, and block these unwanted digital intruders.

Leveraging these tools isn’t just a technical exercise.

It’s a strategic imperative for maintaining website performance, security, and data integrity. Cloudflare ip bypass

The Ever-Evolving Threat: Why Bots are a Persistent Problem

The sophistication of malicious bots is constantly increasing, making effective defense a continuous challenge.

They mimic human behavior, rotate IP addresses, and leverage distributed networks to evade detection.

• Credential Stuffing Attacks: Bots use lists of stolen usernames and passwords to attempt to log into user accounts. According to a 2023 Akamai report, credential stuffing attacks increased by 20% year-over-year. These attacks can compromise user data and reputation.
• Content Scraping: Competitors or malicious actors use bots to steal your unique content, product listings, or pricing data, eroding your competitive edge. This can lead to duplicate content issues, impacting SEO.
• DDoS Attacks Distributed Denial of Service: Malicious bots flood your server with traffic, overwhelming its resources and making your website inaccessible to legitimate users. In Q4 2023, Cloudflare reported mitigating a record-breaking 2.1 million requests per second in one DDoS attack.
• Spam and Form Abuse: Bots submit unwanted comments, create fake accounts, or exploit contact forms for malicious purposes, leading to data pollution and resource drain. This impacts data quality and administrative overhead.
• Ad Fraud: Bots simulate clicks or impressions on ads, draining advertising budgets without generating genuine leads. A report by Juniper Research estimated that ad fraud will cost advertisers $100 billion annually by 2023.

Cloudflare’s Multi-Layered Bot Defense Strategy

Cloudflare’s approach to bot blocking isn’t a single solution but a comprehensive, multi-layered defense system.

It combines global threat intelligence, machine learning, behavioral analysis, and configurable rules to identify and mitigate various types of bot traffic.

This holistic strategy ensures that threats are addressed at different points of entry, minimizing the risk of a breach. Bypass protection

• Global Threat Intelligence: Cloudflare processes over 57 million HTTP requests per second and blocks an average of 140 billion cyber threats daily. This massive dataset allows their system to learn and adapt to new bot patterns in real-time, benefiting all users. This collective intelligence is a powerful deterrent.
• Machine Learning Algorithms: Sophisticated algorithms analyze patterns in traffic, identifying anomalies that indicate bot activity. This includes behavioral analysis, JavaScript challenges, and HTTP header analysis. The system constantly refines its understanding of “normal” versus “bot” traffic.
• Rate Limiting: Essential for preventing brute-force attacks and excessive scraping by limiting the number of requests an IP address can make within a specified timeframe. For instance, setting a rule that blocks an IP if it makes more than 100 requests to a specific page within 5 minutes.
• Managed Challenges: Instead of outright blocking, Cloudflare can issue various challenges like CAPTCHAs, JavaScript challenges, or silent proof-of-work to suspicious requests. This allows legitimate users to pass while effectively deterring automated bots.
• WAF Web Application Firewall Rules: Users can create custom rules within the WAF to block or challenge traffic based on specific criteria like User-Agent strings, IP ranges, countries, or known malicious patterns. This provides granular control over bot mitigation.

Activating and Configuring Cloudflare Bot Management Features

Getting Cloudflare to work effectively for bot blocking involves more than just flipping a single switch.

It’s about strategically enabling and configuring the right features based on your specific needs and the nature of the bot threats you face.

A well-configured setup strikes a balance between robust protection and minimal impact on legitimate users.

• Bot Fight Mode: This is Cloudflare’s foundational bot protection. When enabled, it automatically identifies and mitigates common bot threats using a combination of heuristics and Cloudflare’s threat intelligence. It’s designed to be a low-effort, high-impact solution for most websites.
  • How to Activate: Navigate to your Cloudflare dashboard, select your domain, go to “Security” -> “Bots,” and toggle “Bot Fight Mode” to “On.”
  • Benefit: Provides immediate, broad protection against known bad bots without requiring extensive configuration. It’s a great starting point for any website owner.
• Managed Challenges: This feature intelligently presents various challenges to suspicious traffic. Instead of blocking outright, it validates if the request is from a human without requiring direct user interaction in many cases.
  • Configuration: Found under “Security” -> “Bots.” You can choose when Cloudflare should issue a Managed Challenge e.g., based on threat score, suspicious behavior.
  • Impact: Reduces false positives compared to hard blocking, ensuring legitimate users aren’t inadvertently locked out, while bots are still effectively deterred.
• Super Bot Fight Mode Business & Enterprise Plans: This is the premium tier of Cloudflare’s bot management. It employs advanced machine learning, JavaScript detections, and behavioral analysis to identify and mitigate even the most sophisticated bots that try to mimic human behavior.
  • Key Capabilities:
    • JavaScript Detections: Analyzes browser environments for bot-like characteristics.
    • Heuristics & Machine Learning: Continuously learns from global traffic patterns to identify new bot threats.
    • Granular Control: Provides detailed insights into bot traffic and allows for customizable actions block, challenge, log based on bot categories e.g., “Automated Browsers,” “Spam Bots,” “Scrapers”.

Leveraging WAF Web Application Firewall for Custom Bot Blocking

While Cloudflare’s automated bot features handle a vast majority of threats, sometimes you need surgical precision.

This is where the Web Application Firewall WAF becomes your best friend. Browser bypass

The WAF allows you to create highly specific rules to identify and block bots based on unique characteristics or patterns that might slip past generic defenses.

It’s like having a custom security detail for your most vulnerable digital assets.

• Understanding Firewall Rules Logic: Firewall rules operate on an “if this, then that” principle. You define a set of conditions that, when met, trigger a specific action block, challenge, allow, log, bypass. The power lies in combining multiple conditions to create very precise rules.
  • Example: http.request.uri.path contains "/wp-admin" and not http.user_agent contains "Googlebot" and cf.threat_score gt 10 – this rule would target non-Googlebot, high-threat-score requests to your WordPress admin area.
• Common Conditions for Bot Blocking:
  • User-Agent: Bots often use non-standard or easily identifiable User-Agent strings. You can block known bad ones or challenge requests where the User-Agent is empty or suspicious.
    • Rule Example: http.user_agent contains "MJ12bot" or http.user_agent contains "AhrefsBot" or http.user_agent contains "SemrushBot" and not cf.threat_score gt 0 to allow legitimate crawlers from these, remove the threat score condition or adjust as needed.
  • IP Address/Range: If you identify specific IP addresses or entire IP ranges that are consistently launching attacks, you can block them directly.
    • Rule Example: ip.src eq 1.2.3.4 or ip.src in {5.6.7.0/24}
  • ASN Autonomous System Number: Attackers often originate from specific ASNs known for hosting malicious infrastructure. Blocking by ASN can be effective for broad-stroke mitigation.
    • Rule Example: asn in {12345, 67890}
  • Country: If you have no legitimate traffic from certain countries and are seeing significant attacks from them, geo-blocking can be considered, though it should be used cautiously to avoid blocking legitimate users.
    • Rule Example: ip.geoip.country eq "RU" or ip.geoip.country eq "CN"
  • Threat Score cf.threat_score: Cloudflare assigns a threat score 0-100 to each request based on its global threat intelligence. Higher scores indicate higher risk.
    • Rule Example: cf.threat_score gt 20 – This will block or challenge requests deemed highly suspicious by Cloudflare.
  • HTTP Referer: Some bots don’t send a Referer header, or they send a malicious one. You can use this to identify and block them.
    • Rule Example: not http.referer contains "yourdomain.com" and not http.referer eq "" – This is an advanced rule that might require careful testing.
• Prioritizing WAF Rules: Rules are processed in order. More specific rules should generally come before broader rules. If a request matches a rule, the associated action is taken, and often no further rules are evaluated for that request. This priority system is crucial for effective rule management.
  • Best Practice: Place highly specific BLOCK rules for known bad actors at the top, followed by CHALLENGE rules for suspicious but potentially legitimate traffic, and finally ALLOW rules for trusted sources if needed.

Implementing Rate Limiting for Throttling Malicious Traffic

Rate Limiting is a critical line of defense against attacks that rely on overwhelming your server with requests, such as brute-force attacks, credential stuffing, and excessive scraping.

Instead of outright blocking every suspicious request, Rate Limiting throttles or blocks requests from a single IP address once it exceeds a predefined threshold within a specific timeframe. Proxy bot

This allows legitimate traffic to pass through while slowing down or stopping malicious automated activity.

• How Rate Limiting Works: You define a URL pattern e.g., /login, /api/*, a threshold e.g., 10 requests, a period e.g., 60 seconds, and an action e.g., block, challenge. If an IP exceeds the threshold within that period, the action is triggered for a specified duration.
• Key Parameters for Configuration:
  • URL Pattern: The specific URI or path you want to protect.
    • Example Use Cases:
      • /wp-login.php: Protects your WordPress login page from brute-force attempts.
      • /api/v1/user_data: Protects specific API endpoints from excessive scraping.
      • *yourdomain.com/catalog/*: Protects product catalog pages from high-volume scraping.
  • Threshold: The maximum number of requests allowed from a single IP address.
    • Recommendation: Start with a value that is slightly above your typical legitimate user’s behavior. For a login page, maybe 5-10 requests per minute. For a public API, it might be higher depending on expected usage.
  • Period: The time window over which the requests are counted.
    • Common Periods: 60 seconds, 300 seconds 5 minutes, 3600 seconds 1 hour.
  • Action: What Cloudflare does when the threshold is exceeded.
    • Block: Prevents further requests from that IP for a specified duration. Ideal for severe attacks.
    • Challenge: Presents a Managed Challenge CAPTCHA, JavaScript to the IP. Good for filtering sophisticated bots without outright blocking.
    • Log: Simply logs the event without taking action. Useful for monitoring and fine-tuning.
  • Action Duration: How long the chosen action block/challenge lasts.
    • Typical Durations: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour.
• Practical Rate Limiting Scenarios:
  • Login Page Protection: If a visitor makes 10 requests to /login within 60 seconds from the same IP, then Block for 5 minutes. This prevents brute-force login attempts. According to Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report, web application attacks, often involving credential stuffing, account for 44% of all breaches.
  • API Endpoint Security: If a visitor makes 100 requests to /api/* within 300 seconds from the same IP, then Challenge for 30 minutes. This protects your API from excessive scraping or abuse.
  • Comment Spam Prevention: If a visitor makes 5 requests to /submit-comment within 60 seconds from the same IP, then Block for 10 minutes.
  • Search Page Protection: If your search page is being hammered by bots, If a visitor makes 20 requests to /search?q=* within 60 seconds from the same IP, then Challenge for 5 minutes.
• Monitoring and Adjustment: Rate Limiting rules should not be set and forgotten. Regularly review your Cloudflare Security Events logs to see how your rules are performing. Are you blocking too many legitimate users? Are bots still getting through? Adjust thresholds and durations as needed. Starting with a “Challenge” action can be a good way to test rules before moving to “Block.”

Analyzing Bot Traffic and Refining Your Strategy

Deploying Cloudflare’s bot blocking features is just the first step.

The true mastery comes from continuously monitoring your traffic, analyzing the data, and refining your strategy.

This iterative process allows you to adapt to new bot tactics, optimize your defenses, and ensure your website remains secure and performant.

Think of it as a continuous improvement cycle, much like a good financial plan or health regimen – constant vigilance pays dividends. Cloudflare use

• The Importance of Data: Without data, you’re flying blind. Cloudflare provides a wealth of security analytics that can help you understand the nature of your bot traffic. This information is crucial for making informed decisions about your blocking rules.
• Key Cloudflare Analytics Sections:
  • Security Events Security -> Events: This is your daily logbook. It shows every request that Cloudflare has processed, indicating whether it was blocked, challenged, or allowed.
    • What to Look For:
      • Blocked Requests: Review the reasons for blocking e.g., WAF, Bot Fight Mode, Rate Limiting. Are these blocks legitimate? Are you blocking too many requests from known good sources?
      • Challenged Requests: See which challenges were issued and if they were successfully passed. If many challenges are failing, it might indicate persistent bots or issues with your legitimate users.
      • User-Agents: Identify patterns in User-Agent strings of blocked or challenged requests. Are there specific strings you should add to a custom WAF rule?
      • IP Addresses/ASNs: Look for frequent offenders. Are attacks coming from specific regions or networks?
      • URLs Being Targeted: Which parts of your site are experiencing the most bot activity? This helps you prioritize Rate Limiting or WAF rules for those areas.
  • Analytics -> Traffic: Provides an overview of your website traffic, including the percentage of human vs. bot traffic.
    • Insights: A sudden spike in bot traffic might indicate a targeted attack. A high percentage of “bad” bots suggests your current defenses might need strengthening.
  • Bots Security -> Bots: If you have Super Bot Fight Mode, this section offers detailed insights into different bot categories e.g., Automated Browsers, Scraping Bots, Comment Spammers and the actions taken against them.
    • Benefit: This granular categorization helps you understand the type of bot problem you’re facing, allowing for more targeted solutions. For example, if you’re seeing a lot of “Scraping Bots,” you might focus on Rate Limiting your product pages.
• Refining Your Rules Based on Analysis:
  • False Positives: If legitimate users are being blocked e.g., your payment gateway’s IP, a partner’s API, you’ll see “false positives” in your logs. You might need to add these IPs to a WAF “Allow” list or adjust your rules to be less aggressive.
  • Bots Still Getting Through: If you see malicious activity bypassing your current rules, it’s time to create more specific WAF rules or adjust existing ones. For instance, if a new bot User-Agent appears, add it to a block rule.
  • Performance Impact: Extremely aggressive blocking can sometimes impact legitimate user experience or even site performance. Strive for a balance where you mitigate threats effectively without creating undue friction.
  • Iterative Process: Start with general rules, monitor, then fine-tune. It’s an ongoing process as bot tactics evolve. Review your security events weekly, if not daily, especially after making changes or during periods of high traffic.

Beyond Blocking: Integrating with Other Security Measures

While Cloudflare’s bot blocking is powerful, it’s most effective when integrated into a broader cybersecurity strategy.

No single solution is a silver bullet, and a holistic approach ensures maximum protection.

Think of it like building a robust personal finance plan – it’s not just about earning more, but also about budgeting, saving, investing, and protecting your assets.

• Web Application Firewall WAF Rule Sets: Beyond custom rules, Cloudflare offers managed WAF rule sets that protect against common vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting XSS. These protect your application from exploits that bots often attempt to leverage.
  • Benefit: Provides a foundational layer of protection against known attack vectors, complementing bot-specific rules. Cloudflare’s WAF processes over 57 million HTTP requests per second, providing real-time defense against emerging threats.
• DDoS Protection: Cloudflare’s core strength is its unmetered DDoS protection. Even if bots manage to overwhelm basic defenses, Cloudflare’s massive network can absorb and filter volumetric attacks.
  • Importance: Malicious bots are often the foot soldiers in DDoS attacks. While bot blocking aims to stop them before they launch a full assault, DDoS protection ensures resilience if the attack escalates. Cloudflare regularly mitigates multi-terabit DDoS attacks.
• Rate Limiting: As discussed, this is a crucial component for preventing abuse of specific endpoints and APIs. It complements WAF rules by focusing on volumetric abuse from single IPs.
  • Synergy: Use Rate Limiting for high-traffic, sensitive areas like login pages or API endpoints, while WAF rules handle specific malicious patterns.
• Origin Shield / Argo Smart Routing: Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing can help protect your origin server by routing traffic over Cloudflare’s optimized network, obscuring your true IP address and minimizing direct attacks. Origin Shield adds another layer of caching and defense.
  • Benefit: Prevents attackers from bypassing Cloudflare and directly targeting your server, a common tactic for sophisticated bots.
• Bot Analytics and Insights: Leveraging Cloudflare’s detailed bot analytics especially with Super Bot Fight Mode allows you to understand the nature of the bot traffic targeting your site. This data is invaluable for refining your overall security posture.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Use insights on bot types, origins, and targets to inform not just your Cloudflare rules but also your application-level security development and vulnerability patching.
• Layered Security in Practice:
  1. Cloudflare: Handles the first line of defense – WAF, DDoS protection, Bot Management, Rate Limiting.
  2. Application Layer: Your application code should have its own security best practices e.g., strong password policies, input validation, secure coding.
  3. Server/Infrastructure Security: Regular patching, secure configurations, network segmentation.
  4. Monitoring and Logging: Centralized logging and security information and event management SIEM systems for detecting anomalies.
  5. Incident Response Plan: A defined plan for what to do when a security incident occurs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cloudflare bot blocking?

Cloudflare bot blocking refers to the suite of tools and features offered by Cloudflare designed to identify, challenge, and mitigate automated traffic bots accessing your website.

This includes both malicious bots scrapers, spammers, DDoS attackers and unwanted legitimate bots, while allowing beneficial bots like search engine crawlers. Bypass detection

How does Cloudflare identify bots?

Cloudflare identifies bots through a multi-layered approach involving global threat intelligence, machine learning, behavioral analysis e.g., HTTP header analysis, JavaScript rendering, IP reputation, and specific User-Agent string recognition.

Their vast network sees traffic from millions of websites, allowing them to detect and learn about new bot patterns in real-time.

What is “Bot Fight Mode” in Cloudflare?

Bot Fight Mode is a core Cloudflare feature that automatically detects and mitigates common bot threats.

When enabled, it uses Cloudflare’s intelligence to issue challenges or block requests from known bad bots, offering a foundational layer of protection without requiring extensive configuration.

What is “Super Bot Fight Mode” and who needs it?

Super Bot Fight Mode is an advanced bot management feature available on Cloudflare Business and Enterprise plans. Cloudflare servers

It uses more sophisticated techniques like JavaScript detections, advanced heuristics, and machine learning to identify and mitigate even highly sophisticated bots that mimic human behavior.

It’s ideal for businesses facing persistent, high-volume, or targeted bot attacks, such as those in e-commerce, online gaming, or SaaS.

Can Cloudflare block specific IP addresses or ranges?

Yes, Cloudflare allows you to block specific IP addresses or IP ranges using Firewall Rules.

You can navigate to “Security” -> “WAF” -> “Firewall rules” and create a rule that specifies the IP address or range as a condition and sets the action to “Block.”

How do I block bots based on their User-Agent?

You can block bots based on their User-Agent string by creating a custom Firewall Rule. Browser fingerprinting

In the “Security” -> “WAF” -> “Firewall rules” section, set a condition like http.user_agent contains "bad-bot-string" and choose “Block” as the action.

This is effective for known malicious or unwanted bots.

What is Cloudflare’s Threat Score?

Cloudflare’s Threat Score is a value from 0 to 100 assigned to each request, indicating its likelihood of being malicious. A higher score means higher risk.

You can use this score in Firewall Rules to block or challenge requests e.g., cf.threat_score gt 20 to block highly suspicious requests.

How does Rate Limiting help with bot blocking?

Rate Limiting prevents abuse by allowing you to define thresholds for the number of requests an IP address can make to a specific URL pattern within a given timeframe. Block cloudflare

If the threshold is exceeded, Cloudflare can block or challenge further requests from that IP.

This is crucial for stopping brute-force attacks, credential stuffing, and excessive scraping.

Can Cloudflare prevent content scraping?

Yes, Cloudflare can significantly help prevent content scraping.

By using Bot Fight Mode, Super Bot Fight Mode, Rate Limiting on content pages, and custom Firewall Rules e.g., blocking suspicious User-Agents, or challenging requests from high-threat IPs, you can deter automated scraping bots.

How do I allow legitimate bots like Googlebot?

Cloudflare’s bot management system generally allows legitimate search engine crawlers like Googlebot by default. Cloudflare prevent bots

If you create custom rules that might inadvertently block them, you can add an “Allow” rule that has a higher priority or add exceptions e.g., not http.user_agent contains "Googlebot" as part of a blocking rule condition.

What are Managed Challenges in Cloudflare?

Managed Challenges are an intelligent way Cloudflare validates suspicious requests.

Instead of outright blocking, it presents a challenge like a silent JavaScript challenge, a CAPTCHA, or an interactive challenge to determine if the request is from a human.

This reduces false positives while still deterring bots.

How do I see which bots Cloudflare has blocked?

You can view detailed logs of blocked requests, including those blocked by bot management features, in your Cloudflare dashboard under “Security” -> “Events.” This section provides insights into the reason for the block, the IP address, User-Agent, and other relevant details. Bot detection website

Can Cloudflare protect against DDoS attacks launched by bots?

Yes, Cloudflare offers unmetered DDoS protection as a core service.

Its massive global network is designed to absorb and filter large-scale DDoS attacks, many of which are launched by botnets.

While bot blocking targets the individual bots, DDoS protection defends against the cumulative volumetric attack.

Is bot blocking included in all Cloudflare plans?

Basic bot blocking like Bot Fight Mode and general WAF protection is available on Free and Pro plans.

However, advanced features like Super Bot Fight Mode and more granular bot analytics are exclusive to Business and Enterprise plans. Cloudflare anti bot

What is the “I’m Under Attack Mode™”?

“I’m Under Attack Mode™” is a temporary security setting in Cloudflare that presents an interstitial page to all visitors, performing additional security checks before allowing them to access your site.

It’s designed for immediate, severe DDoS attacks and should be used sparingly as it can impact legitimate user experience.

How can I test my Cloudflare bot blocking rules?

The best way to test your rules is by setting the action to “Log” initially instead of “Block” or “Challenge.” This allows you to see if the rule is matching the intended traffic without impacting users.

After reviewing the logs and confirming accuracy, you can change the action to “Block” or “Challenge.”

Does Cloudflare differentiate between good and bad bots?

Yes, Cloudflare actively differentiates between good bots like search engine crawlers, legitimate API integrations and bad bots scrapers, spammers, attackers. Their threat intelligence and machine learning models are designed to allow beneficial bot traffic while mitigating malicious activity. Cloudflare ddos protection

Can bots bypass Cloudflare’s protection?

While Cloudflare provides robust protection, sophisticated bots constantly evolve to try and bypass security measures.

What if Cloudflare blocks a legitimate user or service?

If Cloudflare inadvertently blocks a legitimate user or service a “false positive”, you can typically resolve this by:

1. Reviewing Security Events: Identify the blocked request and the reason.
2. Creating a WAF Allow Rule: Add the legitimate IP address or User-Agent to an “Allow” firewall rule with a high priority.
3. Adjusting Rule Sensitivity: If using a custom rule, make its conditions less restrictive, or adjust the threat score threshold.

How often should I review my bot blocking strategy?

It’s recommended to review your bot blocking strategy and analyze your Cloudflare security events regularly, ideally weekly or at least monthly.

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