TOKEN2049 - Crypto Under Attack - Aliza Knox (Cloudflare)

Hey calm down the title that's a bit yeah we did to protecting the crypto ecosystem because we felt like it was more you know how like they sell life insurance by making you scared we didn't mean to sort of suggest that crypto was under attack but in fact there are risks so I thought what I would do today is just talk briefly about CloudFlare can I ask you has anybody actually heard of CloudFlare before being here today okay cool that's probably higher than average in a room unfortunately we're not a household name yet but we do do a lot in the crypto industry so I'm glad at least a few of you have heard of us so you might know our mission is to help build a better internet basically were the patching of the internet we want to make the internet fast reliable and secure and if you talk to our founders what happened is the way the Internet started it was like one computer connected to another computer and then it was a couple computers connected to each other and then ISPs came up and they're all these networks and the networks work together but they're disparate and they have different networks and different groups of people who manage these networks have different objectives and they may not all play together nicely and so our goal at CloudFlare is to make it possible for anybody to be on the internet with a reliable service a fast service and one that is secure it's not necessarily something you can count on when you're on the Internet it wasn't set up that way so this just shows you what I was sort of describing which is we went from one computer to many computers to ISPs and the problem is you need a resilient network and particularly if you're going to be in industries like gaming or crypto or any kind of Stock Exchange I mean they're crypto exchanges there are other kinds of stock exchanges that use us as well where there's really a need for speed a need for accuracy and I need to make sure that people aren't breaking in in between these connections that's what CloudFlare is trying to build and we're trying to in a way democratize the availability of this on the internet so we do have free plans which don't deliver everything we have but some performance and security all the way up to enterprise and because of that we have more than 14 million domains on our network now and because of that we basically crowdsource threat data right when people want to gear up to attack crypto mining operation or in exchange they practice somewhere because they know that the crypto exchanges have gone to some lengths to try to make themselves unbeatable and by the same token pun intended they practice before they try to hack JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs right often the hackers now it's about as you know it's about ransom or about getting money it's not just malicious play so it's a big industry people spend money on it they work hard at it and they practice who do they practice on they practice on my wordpress blog or they practice on the local florist in Singapore they do not practice on a well-built exchange and so because we have these 14 million domains we see the attacks coming we're able to use both algorithms and our engineers to code against it and we're able to prevent those kind of attacks when they come to our clients so to us in serving a lot of crypto clients and I'll come to some names and an example in the minute the two most important things we hear people talk about our performance and security so performance sadly we have this great CTO who's very funny and can actually talk to lay people like me as well as tech people and he's explained with a graph which I didn't bring that in all the time that we've been operating we have not been able to change the speed of light it's just the same so the rest of us are as impala trying to increase the speed of the connections on the internet we can't go any faster than the speed of light but we're trying to get as close to it as we can and of course people who are trading people who are mining people on exchanges they want speed they want transactions conducted quickly closed done any wants security and what I was saying before is innovation is great and the ability to spend on technology is great but not just the good actors have that the bad actors have it and so their ability to hack to interfere to intercept data is increasing so this is what we do we could say we patched the internet we sometimes call ourselves the plumbing of the internet that's why people don't know our name we're not a big b2c sort of brand I don't know the plumbing brands the only ones I know I think are Toto toilets and Kohler who have actually started advertising so that's what I feel like we are but we work very hard on performance making you faster we have a hundred and sixty five points of presence around the world and it's growing where we cache things so that we're very close to the people who are using our client systems so the speed to get to them is very fast security DDoS attack prevention when people are trying to just send huge volume of attacks to bring down your origin server and Web Application Firewall which I talked about a minute ago in terms of crowdsourcing threat attacks one of the really interesting things about the way the cloud player system was built for which I can take no credit is that we don't slow things down when we're providing security most security companies have to clean the good traffic from the dirty traffic they will send it to a set of servers that are purpose-built for that all of our servers are the same in every point of presence so it's called anycast they all do all the same work so we act more like a filter the bad traffic in the volumetric traffic gets absorbed because we have a huge network it carries 25 terabit the second I think and the biggest attacks then 1.7 and so we have two we also have to stay the bad guys and for the Web Application Firewall it's more like a sieve and so the good traffic comes through to you and the bad traffic doesn't so there's no slowdown for your customers in terms of how they access your site we're reliable we're independent gives you independence there are some providers who provide everything which is great storing hosting all the way through to security some people don't want vendor lock-in if it's not a concern of yours then that is also an option and this is all on our single platform so let me just give you one example BitFenix so they wanted to maintain high performance they're really advanced you probably know them oh I was going to try to stand somewhere else but that's not I can't actually see they do a lot of Bitcoin trading and they their demand I was just checking my notes went from lower levels to hundreds of millions in transaction volume monthly and they were really worried about keeping up with it and as I said for most of our crypto clients their priorities were what we normally see which is speed and security so what did they do with us they used our load balancer to intelligently spread the front-end traffic they use wife.and DDoS to safeguard their servers and their clients and they're basically you know feel that at this point their clients have peace of mind that their transactions are protected some other names who use us that I'm allowed to share our bit thumb and up it from Korea I'm not quite sure how to say this but key owned a from Japan and Kobe and Oak X from China so those are some Asian ones where I'm allowed to share the names we don't know for sure we've been told we have an extremely high share of crypto trading in exchange just because people know CloudFlare word has gotten around we've proven ourselves with these kinds of clients who you have not only high volume of traffic but often spikes right something happens and there's a lot of activity in the market and so there'll be a huge volume spike at one point and people need to be able to handle that so I think I'm even under my 15 minutes but I was told to keep this very short I know these are a bunch of sort of just almost thought candy for people here and not long in-depth conversations but I just scratched the surface I think of what we've been able to do for the crypto community so if you'd like to talk to me for a few minutes afterwards we can do that we've also got a booth with some information just outside the front door and I hope you'll take the time to explore what CloudFlare might be able to do for your business so thank you very much [Applause] you