Zero trust security made free for at-risk groups with Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company assisting in the development of a better Internet, announced that the Cloudflare One suite of Zero Trust security tools is now free for at-risk public interest groups participating in Cloudflare’s Project Galileo, as well as local and state election sites participating in Cloudflare’s Athenian Project. These organizations will now have access to the comprehensive and deeply integrated Zero Trust tools that were previously only available to large enterprises and are currently used by over 10,000 customers.

“Cloudflare is the only security provider ensuring that Zero Trust is accessible to those most in need – the vulnerable groups in our society, journalists, and nonprofits, as well as the sites that ensure we have trusted, free, and fair elections in the United States,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “These organizations face constant threats and need to be safe online to achieve their missions – and now they’ll have access to the same security architecture that Fortune 500 companies are using.”

Zero Trust is a modern security model that verifies and authorizes all traffic in and out of a business and requires strict identity verification for every person and device. This model replaces the previous one, in which once a device or person was in a network, it was assumed to be trusted and had access to everything in that network. The issue with that strategy is that once an attacker gains access to the network, they have complete control over everything inside.

Zero Trust has become standard for large enterprises, but so far has left out smaller organizations due to smaller IT teams, limited budgets, and lack of resources. “Since COVID, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are more digitally exposed but have not been able to keep up with the right security posture and are increasingly being targeted for cybersecurity attacks”, according to Gartner®. 

Equal Access to Zero Trust

Cloudflare is expanding its Zero Trust suite to two of its Impact Initiatives that support public interest groups’ security needs. Participants in Project Galileo include artists, journalists, humanitarian organizations, and political dissenters who are regularly targeted because of their roles as vulnerable groups. Participants in the Athenian Project are local and state election sites working to protect elections in the United States. These organizations lack the financial resources and security expertise required to counter sophisticated attacks. Previously, advanced security architecture was out of reach, but it was necessary to protect their employees and members and further their missions. These at-risk groups can now use Cloudflare One to:

• Automatically protect organizations from phishing attacks: Email is one of the largest cyber attack vectors on the Internet. Cloudflare Area 1 Security ensures malicious emails are blocked before making it to employees’ inboxes. If a malicious link arrives through other channels and is clicked, Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation and DNS filtering stops the query before the malicious destination can load.
• Connect all employees, applications, partners, and volunteers: Employees can work in any location and still reach internal tools, while controlling exactly who can access which application or service. Administrators can control which partners and volunteers can reach specific applications and resources while logging every attempt.
• Secure a path to the Internet: Whether connecting to a Wi-Fi network on the go or downloading a file from an unfamiliar source, Cloudflare One provides an encrypted, secured on-ramp to the entire Internet and keeps sensitive data from leaving the organization. Cloudflare One will block an attempt to connect to a malicious destination, scan downloads for malware, and block the download before the user can open it. Administrators can create policies that prevent the accidental or malicious loss of data while also restricting uploads to approved destinations.