Cloudflare Takes On Email Security

San Francisco, CA, September 27, 2021 — Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced its entry into email security with new offerings to help solve email challenges in an easy-to-use way that gives customers more control. Now, users will be able to create custom email addresses, manage incoming email routing, and prevent email spoofing and phishing on outgoing emails—all for free. Cloudflare also announced that customers can sign up for early access to its Advanced Email Security Suite, tightly integrated with all of Cloudflare’s Zero Trust solutions, for a more holistic way to keep businesses and their employees secure and productive.

Email is one of the largest threats facing both consumers and businesses today. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center 2020 Internet Crime Report shows that phishing attacks were the most common type of cyberattack in 2020. The reason, according to Forrester: “the biggest problems with email are its ubiquity and our willingness to trust it. Every person has an email account, often more than one, making this medium a perennially ripe target for attackers.” Solutions to date have made inroads into the problem, without comprehensively tackling it.

“Customers have asked us to address email security for years. Today we’re announcing new tools that will help close the biggest remaining network security risk that Cloudflare hasn’t already covered, until now,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “We want to be the network that businesses of any size can plug into for all of their needs. While today marks our first step into this space, we ultimately hope to become the leader in email security.”

Creating, managing, and securing email services can be complex tasks requiring technical expertise. Today Cloudflare is announcing two features that customers can take advantage of to help with this:

Cloudflare Email Routing First, Cloudflare is providing customers with powerful new email routing tools to streamline email management. Cloudflare Email Routing will give customers more control over their email and empower them to have professional addressing while relying on any email hosting provider, whether it's hosted Exchange, managed Office 365, Gmail, Google Workplace, or an old Aol.com address. This is particularly powerful for small businesses who may want to have a custom domain on their email addresses, but behind the scenes still be managing everything out of a consumer Gmail account.

Email Security DNS Wizard Second, Cloudflare is providing tools to help anyone with an email address better protect their brand against phishing and spam. In the past these were difficult to configure and it was easy to make mistakes. Now, with Cloudflare’s Email Security DNS Wizard, it’s one-click for any Cloudflare customer to configure network records like Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to protect from attackers misusing domains to send malicious emails.

Cloudflare customers can take advantage of these free features to:

• Create custom email addresses in a few clicks: Customers can quickly and easily configure custom email addresses for their domain, all with no cost.
• Consolidate multiple email accounts into one unified inbox: Now customers can have a custom domain email address that is automatically forwarded to their preferred mailbox (i.e. Gmail or Outlook) without anyone ever knowing it. Now [name]@[your company].com will keep your email professional and on brand, but available on whatever email provider you are using.
• Inform them of gaps in email security: Cloudflare will automatically display warnings and recommended actions to users if there are gaps in the way they have set up their email security DNS associated with their domain.
• Help secure their domain from phishing and spoofing attacks: Cloudflare will guide website owners through the process of creating the required DNS records to ensure their domain is safe. Creating these DNS records prevents malicious actors from spoofing unsuspecting users’ email domains and sending out fraudulent messages.

Cloudflare also announced its Advanced Email Security Suite, tightly integrating email protection with Cloudflare One, including Browser Isolation. The suite will offer full scanning of emails for security threats, and work in front of any email hosting provider to supplement the anti-spam and security protections they offer. Because Cloudflare’s global network blocks an average of 87 billion cyber threats each day, the company has unique threat intelligence that can allow it to more effectively filter out targeted phishing attacks (spear phishing) and other security threats that general purpose email hosting providers can miss.

Customers who are interested in gaining early access to Cloudflare Advance Email Security Suite, and contributing to its development can sign up here. To learn more about Cloudflare Email Security DNS Wizard and Email Routing, please check out the resources below:

• Blog Email Security DNS Wizard
• Blog Email Routing
• Birthday Week Landing Page

About Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Lisbon, London, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “explore,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “could,” “intend,” “target,” “project,” “contemplate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” or the negative of these words, or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans, or intentions. However, not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Forward-looking statements expressed or implied in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Cloudflare’s development of Advanced Email Security Suite and other products for protecting emails and the capabilities and effectiveness of these products, the potential benefits to customers of using Cloudflare’s Advanced Email Security Suite and other products for protecting emails, the timing of when the various features included in Cloudflare’s Advanced Email Security Suite and other products for protecting emails will be generally available to all current and potential Cloudflare customers, Cloudflare’s technological development, future operations, growth, initiatives, or strategies, and comments made by Cloudflare’s CEO and others. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including but not limited to, risks detailed in Cloudflare’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including Cloudflare’s Annual Report on Form 10-Q filed on August 6, 2021, as well as other filings that Cloudflare may make from time to time with the SEC.

The forward-looking statements made in this press release relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. Cloudflare undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this press release to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Cloudflare may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on Cloudflare’s forward-looking statements.

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