Cloudflare announces it will remain active in the Russian market, although the company is limiting its operations in the country. Furthermore, the company announced it is making some changes to keep user data of Eastern Europeans safe.
Cloudflare does not think it is a good idea to completely suspend operations in Russia. According to the company, a good Internet connection should just be provided in Russia so that Russians are not cut off from the outside world. Otherwise, Russians would be more vulnerable to applicable censorship laws, the company judges.
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The company is taking some measures, though, to comply with the announced sanctions against Russia: “We have shut down paid access to our network and systems in the newly extensively sanctioned regions. And we have excluded all customers we determined were named in the sanctions, including those related to Russian financial institutions, Russian influence campaigns and the Russia-affiliated governments of Donetsk and Luhansk,” writes Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s board chairman.
SSL technology
The company is particularly vigilant about possible cyber attacks, though. Cloudflare is therefore removing all encryption keys hosted in data centers in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus that belong to customers. As an alternative, the company is switching to its Keyless SSL technology.
Because of the technology, customers never own the top security key themselves. The technology lets organizations fall back on cloud providers for encryption. As an organization, you only get session keys, which can be used once.
Help with cybersecurity
Finally, the company shares that it is helping to strengthen Ukraine’s cyber security. At the beginning of the invasion, attacks in the digital world were also launched from Russia. For example, DDoS attacks were launched against several necessary institutions in Ukraine, and stopping these DDoS attacks is just Cloudflare’s specialty. Currently, Cloudflare supports the security of the online environment of 60 organizations in Ukraine.