Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence Makes Cyber Attacks Too Expensive for Fraudsters

Cybersecurity and connectivity cloud provider Cloudflare introduced a new way to fight cyberattacks, according to a Monday (Aug. 31) press release.

Adaptive Intelligence is a continuous real-time detection engine built to counter automated cyber threats by increasing operational costs for attackers, the release said. It is integrated directly into the Cloudflare Bot Management platform. The technology analyzes traffic meta-signals, or contextual data such as browser-level session behavior, across more than 1 trillion daily web visits on Cloudflare’s global network.

Rather than relying on traditional static defenses or scheduled manual updates, the system retrains machine-learning models continuously on live traffic to automatically generate short-lived, hyper-targeted protection rules, according to the release.

Under traditional security models, cybercriminals use cheap automation and rented botnets to test static defenses until they break, incurring minimal cost per attempt, the release said. By constantly shifting defensive rules, real-time threat detection forces attackers to continuously rebuild their tools, elevating the time and financial capital required to sustain an attack.

“Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero,” Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht said in the release. “To stop modern bot threats, you have to flip the economics on the attackers. Traditional defenses 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.”

High Stakes for Financial Services

Cloudflare’s product launch arrived as financial institutions and digital commerce platforms confront an intensifying wave of automated abuse targeting onboarding and authentication workflows.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Hidden Costs of ‘Good Enough’: Identity Verification in the Age of Bots and Agents” found in October that financial services firms are bearing the brunt of this trend, with 60.6% reporting an increase in bot traffic over the past year, the highest proportion of any industry sector. Across global enterprises, identity verification gaps driven by automated bots now inflict an average 3.1% annual revenue drag, representing a collective $95 billion annual toll.

The data highlighted a confidence gap among enterprise security leadership. While 96.3% of surveyed executives said they are confident in their bot defenses, 90% reported ongoing operational challenges from hostile automated traffic. Rather than causing simple network downtime, modern adversarial bots target customer logins and transaction authorizations, driving up manual review costs, elevating false decline rates and increasing compliance risks under anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) mandates.