Cloudflare under the hood: how it works and how attackers try to get around it

Short summary

Cloudflare operates as a 300+ PoP global edge network using anycast routing to intercept all traffic before reaching your origin, handling DDoS mitigation, WAF rules, and Turnstile bot detection at the edge. Attackers bypass Cloudflare by discovering the origin IP via certificate transparency logs, historical DNS records, unproxied subdomains, mail server lookups, or TLS fingerprinting on Shodan/Censys. The Turnstile bot challenge can be defeated with human CAPTCHA solving services or stealth-configured headless browsers using spoofed fingerprints.

• •Cloudflare uses anycast routing across 300+ PoPs to intercept requests with DDoS mitigation, WAF, and Turnstile bot detection before reaching origin
• •Origin IP can be discovered via certificate transparency logs, DNS archives, unproxied subdomains, mail records, or TLS fingerprinting on public databases
• •Turnstile bot detection bypassed with human CAPTCHA solving services or headless browser automation with realistic browser fingerprints

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.