Cloudflare launches first-ever bot defence against automated attacks

Cloudflare announced Adaptive Intelligence, a new continuous detection engine built directly into Cloudflare Bot Management. Powered by insights from trillions of requests across Cloudflare’s massive global network, Adaptive Intelligence autonomously learns from the meta-signals of live traffic, generating short-lived rules that make automated attacks far too expensive and time-consuming to continually launch. Organisations will now have access to a powerful detection engine built to adapt and react instantly when threat actors breach their defences.

Launching an automated cyberattack used to require advanced engineering skills, but modern AI and cheap online tools have made it simple and inexpensive to carry out. Today, nearly anyone with a modest budget can easily rent networks of compromised devices, mask their location behind real home Internet addresses, and use free software that mimics basic human behavior. This creates a deeply unfair battle for online businesses. While attackers can try endless, low-cost attempts until they succeed, security teams still have to stop every threat instantly without accidentally blocking a real visitor or customer. Compounding the problem, traditional security tools still rely on slow, scheduled updates that can take weeks or months to deploy—leaving businesses defenceless against modern threat actors who change their tactics in a matter of hours, and in some cases, minutes.

“Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero. To stop modern bot threats, you have to flip the economics on the attackers. Traditional defences offer a static target that threat actors can systematically solve. Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence creates a moving target—rendering an attacker’s engineering efforts obsolete before their operation can ever achieve scale,” said Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare.

Unlike conventional bot mitigation products that rely on fixed updates, Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence acts like a single, constantly learning brain. By analysing more than a trillion web visits every day to spot new threats as they happen, customers can:

• Implement always-on defence: Cloudflare’s ML model retrains continuously on live traffic, integrating new bot frameworks and bypass techniques into the detection engine in real time instead of waiting for manual updates or scheduled releases.
• Force attackers to start over every time: Adaptive Intelligence automatically generates short-lived, hyper-targeted rules to block specific threats. Rotating rules prevents attackers from studying the system, mapping defences, or making lasting progress.
• Catch stealthy attacks: Now customers can analyse multi-timeframe behavior patterns simultaneously to catch low-and-slow threats—like slow credential stuffing and scraping campaigns—that easily hide from traditional defences.
• Spot malicious intent without blocking real humans: By combining browser-level session behavior signals from Cloudflare Precursor with global edge telemetry, the multi-layered architecture will be able to evaluate automation and abuse beyond basic binary tests.
• Deploy upgrades safely and autonomously: Security updates automatically test themselves against live traffic behind the scenes, verifying accuracy and deterring false positives before deployment with zero downtime.