Who knew that keeping the LulzSec website operational would lead to a technology award? The World Economic Forum (WEF), which puts on the annual Davos, Switzerland confab of the world's business elite, has just released its list of "Technology Pioneers 2012" (PDF)—and it named CloudFlare one of the world's 25 innovators worth watching, in part because LulzSec hackers used the company's services.
LulzSec is certainly on the minds of WEF staff, and is thus likely on the minds of businesses across the globe. The hacking group appears in the very first paragraph of the new Technology Pioneers report for its infiltration of Sony servers and the later takedown of the PlayStation Network. "LulzSec, a group estimated to be six youthful hackers, cracked into Sony servers and stole passwords and confidential information concerning a million customers," said the report. "Clean-up and insurance costs from the debacle were estimated at more than US$ 170 million." (WEF also helpfully explains that the group's name is derived from "Laughing out loud at security.")
LulzSec created its own website and then signed up with CloudFlare, which isn't a Web hosting provider, but a network operator. Requests to CloudFlare-connected sites route through CloudFlare servers first, and the company says it can double the speed of site delivery while also protecting websites against denial of service attacks and other online problems.
In LulzSec's case, the denial of service attacks came quickly after the group released information from its Sony hacks, but the site stayed up. In a blog post two months ago, CloudFlare boss Matthew Prince described how the attacks made CloudFlare's service better:
The experience of being attacked by some of the Internet's most notorious hackers has validated CloudFlare's core value proposition: if you can share data about attacks across a network, rather than keeping it siloed within each organization, everyone using that network can benefit. As hackers tried to take down LulzSec, CloudFlare recorded all the patterns of the attacks. In the last 3 weeks, we've generated more than 1 million new rules to better mitigate threats targeted at our users. Those rules were propagated in realtime to benefit the whole CloudFlare community. We've written about this benefit previously and it was truly awesome to watch as the system rapidly got smarter and smarter as more attacks were launched. While we will never stop every attack, we will also never stop learning.
WEF singled out this approach to site security, noting that "In an ironic twist, one of CloudFlare’s former clients turned out to be the hacker group, LulzSec, a vote of confidence in CloudFlare’s approach."
CloudFlare welcomed its place on the list, noting that it has "stopped more than a billion attacks directed at its customers’ websites" and had sped up load times enough to save "more than 50 lives worth of time every month that would have otherwise been spent waiting for websites to load."
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