Cloudflare's New Defence Aims to Make Cyberattacks Too Costly for Criminals

Cloudflare has announced a new defensive technology called Adaptive Intelligence, designed to counter automated cyberattacks by making them more expensive and less viable for attackers to run. According to the company's announcement, the tool works as a continuous, real-time detection engine that identifies and responds to malicious automated traffic as it happens.

Automated attacks, such as bot-driven fraud, credential stuffing, and scraping, rely on being cheap to scale. By continuously adapting its detection methods, Cloudflare's system aims to force attackers to spend more time, money, and effort to get around defences, reducing the profitability of large-scale automated campaigns.

For small and medium businesses that rely on Cloudflare or similar cloud security providers, this kind of development reflects a broader industry shift toward proactive, adaptive defences rather than static rule-based blocking. As automated attacks become more sophisticated, businesses should ensure their web and application security providers are using similarly dynamic, real-time protections.