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A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran’s time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.

Experts say the wiper campaign against Iran materialized this past weekend and came from a relatively new cybercrime group known as TeamPCP. In December 2025, the group began compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm that went after exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Redis servers, and the React2Shell vulnerability. TeamPCP then attempted to move laterally through victim networks, siphoning authentication credentials and extorting victims over Telegram.

A snippet of the malicious CanisterWorm that seeks out and destroys data on systems that match Iran’s timezone or have Farsi as the default language. Image: Aikido.dev.

In a profile of TeamPCP published in January, the security firm Flare said the group weaponizes exposed control planes rather than exploiting endpoints, predominantly targeting cloud infrastructure over end-user devices, with Azure (61%) and AWS (36%) accounting for 97% of compromised servers.

“TeamPCP’s strength does not come from novel exploits or original malware, but from the large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques,” Flare’s Assaf Morag wrote. “The group industrializes existing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and recycled tooling into a cloud-native exploitation platform that turns exposed infrastructure into a self-propagating criminal ecosystem.”

On March 19, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack against the vulnerability scanner Trivy from Aqua Security, injecting credential-stealing malware into official releases on GitHub actions. Aqua Security said it has since removed the harmful files, but the security firm Wiz notes the attackers were able to publish malicious versions that snarfed SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes tokens and cryptocurrency wallets from users.

Over the weekend, the same technical infrastructure TeamPCP used in the Trivy attack was leveraged to deploy a new malicious payload which executes a wiper attack if the user’s timezone and locale are determined to correspond to Iran, said Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido. In a blog post published on Sunday, Eriksen said if the wiper component detects that the victim is in Iran and has access to a Kubernetes cluster, it will destroy data on every node in that cluster.

“If it doesn’t it will just wipe the local machine,” Eriksen told KrebsOnSecurity.

Image: Aikido.dev.

Aikido refers to TeamPCP’s infrastructure as “CanisterWorm” because the group orchestrates their campaigns using an Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) canister — a system of tamperproof, blockchain-based “smart contracts” that combine both code and data. ICP canisters can serve Web content directly to visitors, and their distributed architecture makes them resistant to takedown attempts. These canisters will remain reachable so long as their operators continue to pay virtual currency fees to keep them online.

Eriksen said the people behind TeamPCP are bragging about their exploits in a group on Telegram and claim to have used the worm to steal vast amounts of sensitive data from major companies, including a large multinational pharmaceutical firm.

“When they compromised Aqua a second time, they took a lot of GitHub accounts and started spamming these with junk messages,” Eriksen said. “It was almost like they were just showing off how much access they had. Clearly, they have an entire stash of these credentials, and what we’ve seen so far is probably a small sample of what they have.”

Security experts say the spammed GitHub messages could be a way for TeamPCP to ensure that any code packages tainted with their malware will remain prominent in GitHub searches. In a newsletter published today titled GitHub is Starting to Have a Real Malware Problem, Risky Business reporter Catalin Cimpanu writes that attackers often are seen pushing meaningless commits to their repos or using online services that sell GitHub stars and “likes” to keep malicious packages at the top of the GitHub search page.

This weekend’s outbreak is the second major supply chain attack involving Trivy in as many months. At the end of February, Trivy was hit as part of an automated threat called HackerBot-Claw, which mass exploited misconfigured workflows in GitHub Actions to steal authentication tokens.

Eriksen said it appears TeamPCP used access gained in the first attack on Aqua Security to perpetrate this weekend’s mischief. But he said there is no reliable way to tell whether TeamPCP’s wiper actually succeeded in trashing any data from victim systems, and that the malicious payload was only active for a short time over the weekend.

“They’ve been taking [the malicious code] up and down, rapidly changing it adding new features,” Eriksen said, noting that when the malicious canister wasn’t serving up malware downloads it was pointing visitors to a Rick Roll video on YouTube.

“It’s a little all over the place, and there’s a chance this whole Iran thing is just their way of getting attention,” Eriksen said. “I feel like these people are really playing this Chaotic Evil role here.”

Cimpanu observed that supply chain attacks have increased in frequency of late as threat actors begin to grasp just how efficient they can be, and his post documents an alarming number of these incidents since 2024.

“While security firms appear to be doing a good job spotting this, we’re also gonna need GitHub’s security team to step up,” Cimpanu wrote. “Unfortunately, on a platform designed to copy (fork) a project and create new versions of it (clones), spotting malicious additions to clones of legitimate repos might be quite the engineering problem to fix.”

Update, 2:40 p.m. ET: Wiz is reporting that TeamPCP also pushed credential stealing malware to the KICS vulnerability scanner from Checkmarx, and that the scanner’s GitHub Action was compromised between 12:58 and 16:50 UTC today (March 23rd).

During a recent investigation, we uncovered a phishing operation that combines free hosting on developer platforms with compromised legitimate websites to build convincing banking and insurance login portals. These fake pages don’t just grab a username and password–they also ask for answers to secret questions and other “backup” data that attackers can use to bypass multi-factor authentication and account recovery protections.

Instead of sending stolen data to a traditional command-and-control server, the kit forwards every submission to a Telegram bot. That gives the attackers a live feed of fresh logins they can use right away. It also sidesteps many domain-based blocking strategies and makes swapping infrastructure very easy.​

Phishing groups increasingly use services like Cloudflare Pages (*.pages.dev) to host their fake portals, sometimes copying a real login screen almost pixel for pixel. In this case, the actors spun up subdomains impersonating financial and healthcare providers. The first one we found was impersonating Heartland bank Arvest.

To be clear, these companies have not been compromised and accessing their websites from trusted domains remains safe. What is instead happening is that these companies are having their online likenesses faked as a way to fool victims in a longer attack chain that often starts with a phishing email.

On closer look, the phishing site shows visitors two “failed login” screens, prompts for security questions, and then sends all credentials and answers to a Telegram bot.

Comparing their infrastructure with other sites, we found one impersonating a much more widely known brand: United Healthcare.

In this case, the phishers abused a compromised website as a redirector. Attackers took over a legitimate-looking domain like biancalentinidesigns[.]com and saddle it with long, obscure paths for phishing or redirection. Emails link to the real domain first, which then forwards the victim to the active Cloudflare pages phishing site. Messages containing a familiar or benign-looking domain are more likely to slip past spam filters than links that go straight to an obviously new cloud-hosted subdomain.​

Cloud-based hosting also makes takedowns harder. If one *.pages.dev hostname gets reported and removed, attackers can quickly deploy the same kit under another random subdomain and resume operations.​

The phishing kit at the heart of this campaign follows a multi-step pattern designed to look like a normal sign-in flow while extracting as much sensitive data as possible.​

Instead of using a regular form submission to a visible backend, JavaScript harvests the fields and bundles them into a message sent straight to the Telegram API.. That message can include the victim’s IP address, user agent, and all captured fields, giving criminals a tidy snapshot they can use to bypass defenses or sign in from a similar environment.​

The exfiltration mechanism is one of the most worrying parts. Rather than pushing credentials to a single hosted panel, the kit posts them into one or more Telegram chats using bot tokens and chat IDs hardcoded in the JavaScript. As soon as a victim submits a form, the operator receives a message in their Telegram client with the details, ready for immediate use or resale.​

This approach offers several advantages for the attackers: they can change bots and chat IDs frequently, they do not need to maintain their own server, and many security controls pay less attention to traffic that looks like a normal connection to a well-known messaging platform. Cycling multiple bots and chats gives them redundancy if one token is reported and revoked.​

What an attack might look like

Putting all the pieces together, a victim’s experience in this kind of campaign often looks like this:​

• They receive a phishing email about banking or health benefits: “Your online banking access is restricted,” or “Urgent: United Health benefits update.”
• The link points to a legitimate but compromised site, using a long or strange path that does not raise instant suspicion.​
• That hacked site redirects, silently or after a brief delay, to a *.pages.dev phishing site that looks almost identical to the impersonated brand.​
• After entering their username and password, the victim sees an error or extra verification step and is asked to provide answers to secret questions or more personal and financial information.​
• Behind the scenes, each submitted field is captured in JavaScript and sent to a Telegram bot, where the attacker can use or sell it immediately.​

From the victim’s point of view, nothing seems unusual beyond an odd-looking link and a failed sign-in. For the attackers, the mix of free hosting, compromised redirectors, and Telegram-based exfiltration gives them speed, scale, and resilience.

The bigger trend behind this campaign is clear: by leaning on free web hosting and mainstream messaging platforms, phishing actors avoid many of the choke points defenders used to rely on, like single malicious IPs or obviously shady domains. Spinning up new infrastructure is cheap, fast, and largely invisible to victims.

How to stay safe

Education and a healthy dose of skepticism are key components to staying safe. A few habits can help you avoid these portals:​

• Always check the full domain name, not just the logo or page design. Banks and health insurers don’t host sign-in pages on generic developer domains like *.pages.dev, *.netlify.app, or on strange paths on unrelated sites.​
• Don’t click sign-in or benefits links in unsolicited emails or texts. Instead, go to the institution’s site via a bookmark or by typing the address yourself.​
• Treat surprise “extra security” prompts after a failed login with caution, especially if they ask for answers to security questions, card numbers, or email passwords.​
• If anything about the link, timing, or requested information feels wrong, stop and contact the provider using trusted contact information from their official site.
• Use an up-to-date anti-malware solution with a web protection component.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes free Browser Guard extension blocked these websites.

We don’t just report on threats—we help safeguard your entire digital identity

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Protect your, and your family’s, personal information by using identity protection.

An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday briefly knocked many of the Internet’s top destinations offline. Some affected Cloudflare customers were able to pivot away from the platform temporarily so that visitors could still access their websites. But security experts say doing so may have also triggered an impromptu network penetration test for organizations that have come to rely on Cloudflare to block many types of abusive and malicious traffic.

At around 6:30 EST/11:30 UTC on Nov. 18, Cloudflare’s status page acknowledged the company was experiencing “an internal service degradation.” After several hours of Cloudflare services coming back up and failing again, many websites behind Cloudflare found they could not migrate away from using the company’s services because the Cloudflare portal was unreachable and/or because they also were getting their domain name system (DNS) services from Cloudflare.

However, some customers did manage to pivot their domains away from Cloudflare during the outage. And many of those organizations probably need to take a closer look at their web application firewall (WAF) logs during that time, said Aaron Turner, a faculty member at IANS Research.

Turner said Cloudflare’s WAF does a good job filtering out malicious traffic that matches any one of the top ten types of application-layer attacks, including credential stuffing, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, bot attacks and API abuse. But he said this outage might be a good opportunity for Cloudflare customers to better understand how their own app and website defenses may be failing without Cloudflare’s help.

“Your developers could have been lazy in the past for SQL injection because Cloudflare stopped that stuff at the edge,” Turner said. “Maybe you didn’t have the best security QA [quality assurance] for certain things because Cloudflare was the control layer to compensate for that.”

Turner said one company he’s working with saw a huge increase in log volume and they are still trying to figure out what was “legit malicious” versus just noise.

“It looks like there was about an eight hour window when several high-profile sites decided to bypass Cloudflare for the sake of availability,” Turner said. “Many companies have essentially relied on Cloudflare for the OWASP Top Ten [web application vulnerabilities] and a whole range of bot blocking. How much badness could have happened in that window? Any organization that made that decision needs to look closely at any exposed infrastructure to see if they have someone persisting after they’ve switched back to Cloudflare protections.”

Turner said some cybercrime groups likely noticed when an online merchant they normally stalk stopped using Cloudflare’s services during the outage.

“Let’s say you were an attacker, trying to grind your way into a target, but you felt that Cloudflare was in the way in the past,” he said. “Then you see through DNS changes that the target has eliminated Cloudflare from their web stack due to the outage. You’re now going to launch a whole bunch of new attacks because the protective layer is no longer in place.”

Nicole Scott, senior product marketing manager at the McLean, Va. based Replica Cyber, called yesterday’s outage “a free tabletop exercise, whether you meant to run one or not.”

“That few-hour window was a live stress test of how your organization routes around its own control plane and shadow IT blossoms under the sunlamp of time pressure,” Scott said in a post on LinkedIn. “Yes, look at the traffic that hit you while protections were weakened. But also look hard at the behavior inside your org.”

Scott said organizations seeking security insights from the Cloudflare outage should ask themselves:

1. What was turned off or bypassed (WAF, bot protections, geo blocks), and for how long?
2. What emergency DNS or routing changes were made, and who approved them?
3. Did people shift work to personal devices, home Wi-Fi, or unsanctioned Software-as-a-Service providers to get around the outage?
4. Did anyone stand up new services, tunnels, or vendor accounts “just for now”?
5. Is there a plan to unwind those changes, or are they now permanent workarounds?
6. For the next incident, what’s the intentional fallback plan, instead of decentralized improvisation?

In a postmortem published Tuesday evening, Cloudflare said the disruption was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack or malicious activity of any kind.

“Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a ‘feature file’ used by our Bot Management system,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote. “That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”

Cloudflare estimates that roughly 20 percent of websites use its services, and with much of the modern web relying heavily on a handful of other cloud providers including AWS and Azure, even a brief outage at one of these platforms can create a single point of failure for many organizations.

Martin Greenfield, CEO at the IT consultancy Quod Orbis, said Tuesday’s outage was another reminder that many organizations may be putting too many of their eggs in one basket.

“There are several practical and overdue fixes,” Greenfield advised. “Split your estate. Spread WAF and DDoS protection across multiple zones. Use multi-vendor DNS. Segment applications so a single provider outage doesn’t cascade. And continuously monitor controls to detect single-vendor dependency.”

For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru’s overlords are using the botnet to boost their malicious domain rankings, while simultaneously attacking the company’s domain name system (DNS) service.

The #1 and #3 positions in this chart are Aisuru botnet controllers with their full domain names redacted. Source: radar.cloudflare.com.

Aisuru is a rapidly growing botnet comprising hundreds of thousands of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as poorly secured Internet routers and security cameras. The botnet has increased in size and firepower significantly since its debut in 2024, demonstrating the ability to launch record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks nearing 30 terabits of data per second.

Until recently, Aisuru’s malicious code instructed all infected systems to use DNS servers from Google — specifically, the servers at 8.8.8.8. But in early October, Aisuru switched to invoking Cloudflare’s main DNS server — 1.1.1.1 — and over the past week domains used by Aisuru to control infected systems started populating Cloudflare’s top domain rankings.

As screenshots of Aisuru domains claiming two of the Top 10 positions ping-ponged across social media, many feared this was yet another sign that an already untamable botnet was running completely amok. One Aisuru botnet domain that sat prominently for days at #1 on the list was someone’s street address in Massachusetts followed by “.com”. Other Aisuru domains mimicked those belonging to major cloud providers.

Cloudflare tried to address these security, brand confusion and privacy concerns by partially redacting the malicious domains, and adding a warning at the top of its rankings:

“Note that the top 100 domains and trending domains lists include domains with organic activity as well as domains with emerging malicious behavior.”

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told KrebsOnSecurity the company’s domain ranking system is fairly simplistic, and that it merely measures the volume of DNS queries to 1.1.1.1.

“The attacker is just generating a ton of requests, maybe to influence the ranking but also to attack our DNS service,” Prince said, adding that Cloudflare has heard reports of other large public DNS services seeing similar uptick in attacks. “We’re fixing the ranking to make it smarter. And, in the meantime, redacting any sites we classify as malware.”

Renee Burton, vice president of threat intel at the DNS security firm Infoblox, said many people erroneously assumed that the skewed Cloudflare domain rankings meant there were more bot-infected devices than there were regular devices querying sites like Google and Apple and Microsoft.

“Cloudflare’s documentation is clear — they know that when it comes to ranking domains you have to make choices on how to normalize things,” Burton wrote on LinkedIn. “There are many aspects that are simply out of your control. Why is it hard? Because reasons. TTL values, caching, prefetching, architecture, load balancing. Things that have shared control between the domain owner and everything in between.”

Alex Greenland is CEO of the anti-phishing and security firm Epi. Greenland said he understands the technical reason why Aisuru botnet domains are showing up in Cloudflare’s rankings (those rankings are based on DNS query volume, not actual web visits). But he said they’re still not meant to be there.

“It’s a failure on Cloudflare’s part, and reveals a compromise of the trust and integrity of their rankings,” he said.

Greenland said Cloudflare planned for its Domain Rankings to list the most popular domains as used by human users, and it was never meant to be a raw calculation of query frequency or traffic volume going through their 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver.

“They spelled out how their popularity algorithm is designed to reflect real human use and exclude automated traffic (they said they’re good at this),” Greenland wrote on LinkedIn. “So something has evidently gone wrong internally. We should have two rankings: one representing trust and real human use, and another derived from raw DNS volume.”

Why might it be a good idea to wholly separate malicious domains from the list? Greenland notes that Cloudflare Domain Rankings see widespread use for trust and safety determination, by browsers, DNS resolvers, safe browsing APIs and things like TRANCO.

“TRANCO is a respected open source list of the top million domains, and Cloudflare Radar is one of their five data providers,” he continued. “So there can be serious knock-on effects when a malicious domain features in Cloudflare’s top 10/100/1000/million. To many people and systems, the top 10 and 100 are naively considered safe and trusted, even though algorithmically-defined top-N lists will always be somewhat crude.”

Over this past week, Cloudflare started redacting portions of the malicious Aisuru domains from its Top Domains list, leaving only their domain suffix visible. Sometime in the past 24 hours, Cloudflare appears to have begun hiding the malicious Aisuru domains entirely from the web version of that list. However, downloading a spreadsheet of the current Top 200 domains from Cloudflare Radar shows an Aisuru domain still at the very top.

According to Cloudflare’s website, the majority of DNS queries to the top Aisuru domains — nearly 52 percent — originated from the United States. This tracks with my reporting from early October, which found Aisuru was drawing most of its firepower from IoT devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

Experts tracking Aisuru say the botnet relies on well more than a hundred control servers, and that for the moment at least most of those domains are registered in the .su top-level domain (TLD). Dot-su is the TLD assigned to the former Soviet Union (.su’s Wikipedia page says the TLD was created just 15 months before the fall of the Berlin wall).

A Cloudflare blog post from October 27 found that .su had the highest “DNS magnitude” of any TLD, referring to a metric estimating the popularity of a TLD based on the number of unique networks querying Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver. The report concluded that the top .su hostnames were associated with a popular online world-building game, and that more than half of the queries for that TLD came from the United States, Brazil and Germany [it’s worth noting that servers for the world-building game Minecraft were some of Aisuru’s most frequent targets].

A simple and crude way to detect Aisuru bot activity on a network may be to set an alert on any systems attempting to contact domains ending in .su. This TLD is frequently abused for cybercrime and by cybercrime forums and services, and blocking access to it entirely is unlikely to raise any legitimate complaints.

Over the years, Cloudflare has gained fame for many things, including our technical blog, but also as a tech company securing the Internet using lava lamps, a story that began as a research/science project almost 10 years ago. In March 2025, we added another layer to its legacy: a "wall of entropy" made of 50 wave machines in constant motion at our Lisbon office, the company's European HQ. 

These wave machines are a new source of entropy, joining lava lamps in San Francisco, suspended rainbows in Austin, and double chaotic pendulums in London. The entropy they generate contributes to securing the Internet through LavaRand.

^{The new waves wall at Cloudflare’s Lisbon office sits beside the Radar Display of global Internet insights, with the 25th of April Bridge overlooking the Tagus River in the background.}

It’s exciting to see waves in Portugal now playing a role in keeping the Internet secure, especially given Portugal’s deep maritime history.

The installation honors Portugal’s passion for the sea and exploration of the unknown, famously beginning over 600 years ago, in 1415, with pioneering vessels like caravels and naus/carracks, precursors to galleons and other ships. Portuguese sea exploration was driven by navigation schools and historic voyages “through seas never sailed before” (“Por mares nunca dantes navegados” in Portuguese), as described by Portugal’s famous poet, Luís Vaz de Camões, born 500 years ago (1524).

Anyone familiar with Portugal knows the sea is central to its identity. The small country has 980 km of coastline, where most of its main cities are located. Maritime areas make up 90% of its territory, including the mid-Atlantic Azores. In 1998, Lisbon’s Expo 98 celebrated the oceans and this maritime heritage. Since 2011, the small town of Nazaré also became globally famous among the surfing community for its giant waves.

^{Nazaré’s waves, famous since Garrett McNamara’s 23.8 m (78 ft) ride in 2011, hold Guinness World Records for the biggest waves ever surfed. Photos: Sam Khawasé & Beatriz Paula, from Cloudflare.}

Portugal’s maritime culture also inspired literature and music, including poet Fernando Pessoa, who referenced it in his 1934 book Mensagem, and musician Rui Veloso, who dedicated his 1990s album Auto da Pimenta to Portugal’s historic connection to the sea.

As Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said recently, this new wall of entropy began with an idea back in 2023: “What could we use for randomness that was like our lava lamp wall in San Francisco but represented our team in Portugal?”

The original inspiration came from wave motion machine desk toys, which were popular among some of our team members. Waves and the ocean not only provide a source of movement and randomness, but also align with Portugal’s maritime history and the office’s scenic view.

However, this was easier said than done. It turns out that making a wave machine wall is a real challenge, given that these toys are not as popular as they were in the past,  and aren’t being manufactured in the size we needed any more. We scoured eBay and other sources but couldn't find enough, consistent in style and in working order wave machines. We also discovered that off-the-shelf models weren’t designed to run 24/7, which was a critical requirement for our use.

Undaunted, Cloudflare’s Places team, which ensures our offices reflect our values and culture, found a U.S.-based artisan that specializes in ocean wave displays to create the wave machines for us. Since 2009, his one-person business, Hughes Wave Motion Machines, has blended artistry, engineering, and research, following his transition from Lockheed Martin Space Systems, where he designed military and commercial satellites.

^{Timelapse of the mesmerizing office waves, set to the tune of an AI-generated song.}

Collaborating closely, we developed a custom rectangular wave machine (18 inches/45 cm long) that runs nonstop — not an easy task — which required hundreds of hours of testing and many iterations. Featuring rotating wheels, continuous motors, and a unique fluid formula, these machines create realistic ocean-like waves in green, blue, and Cloudflare’s signature orange. 

Here’s a quote from the artist himself about these wave machines:

“The machine’s design is a balancing act of matching components and their placement to how the fluid responds in a given configuration. There is a complex yet delicate relationship between viscosity, specific gravity, the size and design of the vessel, and the placement of each mechanical interface. Everything must be precisely aligned, centered around the fluid like a mathematical function. I like to say it’s akin to ’balancing a checkerboard on a beach ball in the wind.’”

^{The Cloudflare Places Team with Lisbon office architects and contractor testing wave machine placement, shelves, lighting, and mirrors to enhance movement and reflection, March 2024.}

Despite delays, the Lisbon wave machines finally debuted on March 10, 2025 — an incredibly exciting moment for the Places team.

Some numbers about our wave-machine entropy wall:

• 50 wave machines, 50 motion wheels & motors, 50 acrylic containers filled with Hughes Wave Fluid Formula (two immiscible liquids)

• 3 liquid colors: blue, green, and orange

• 15 months from concept to completion

• 14 flips (side-to-side balancing movements) per minute — over 20,000 per day

• Over 15 waves per minute

• ~0.5 liters of liquid per machine

Cloudflare’s servers handle 71 million HTTP requests per second on average, with 100 million HTTP requests per second at peak. Most of these requests are secured via TLS, which relies on secure randomness for cryptographic integrity. A Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generator (CSPRNG) ensures unpredictability, but only when seeded with high-quality entropy. Since chaotic movement in the real world is truly random, Cloudflare designed a system to harness it. Our 2024 blog post expands on this topic in a more technical way, but here’s a quick summary.

In 2017, Cloudflare launched LavaRand, inspired by Silicon Graphics’ 1997 concept However, the need for randomness in security was already a hot topic on our blog before that, such as in our discussions of securing systems and cryptography. Originally, LavaRand collected entropy from a wall of lava lamps in our San Francisco office, feeding an internal API that servers periodically query to include in their entropy pools. Over time, we expanded LavaRand beyond lava lamps, incorporating new sources of office chaos while maintaining the same core method.

A camera captures images of dynamic, unpredictable randomness displays. Shadows, lighting changes, and even sensor noise contribute entropy. Each image is then processed into a compact hash, converting it into a sequence of random bytes. These, combined with the previous seed and local system entropy, serve as input for a Key Derivation Function (KDF), which generates a new seed for a CSPRNG — capable of producing virtually unlimited random bytes upon request. The waves in our Lisbon office are now contributing to this pool of randomness.

Cloudflare’s LavaRand API makes this randomness accessible internally, strengthening cryptographic security across our global infrastructure. For example, when you use Math.random() in Cloudflare Workers, part of that randomness comes from LavaRand. Similarly, querying our drand API taps into LavaRand as well. Cloudflare offers this API to enable anyone to generate random numbers and even seed their own systems.

^{Photo of the view from our Lisbon office, featuring ceiling lights arranged in a wave-like pattern.}

Entropy also inspired the design ethos of our new Lisbon office, given that the wall of waves and the office are part of the same project. As soon as you enter, you're greeted not only by the motion of the entropy wall but also by the constant movement of planet Earth on our Cloudflare Radar Display screen that stands next to it. But the waves don’t stop there — more elements throughout the space mimic the dynamic flow of the Internet itself. Unlike ocean tides, however, Internet traffic ebbs and flows with the motion of the Sun, not the Moon.

As you walk through the office, waves are everywhere — in the ceiling lights, the architectural contours, and even the floor plan, thoughtfully designed by our architect to reflect the fluid movement of water. The visual elements create a cohesive experience, reinforcing a sense of motion. Each meeting room embraces this maritime theme, named after famous Portuguese beaches — including, naturally, Nazaré.

We partnered with an incredible group of local Portuguese vendors for this construction project, where all the leads were women — something incredibly rare for the industry. The local teams worked with passion, proudly wore Cloudflare t-shirts, and fostered a warm, family-like atmosphere. They openly expressed pride in the project, sharing how it stood out from anything they had worked on before.

^{Our amazing third-party team and internal Places team, proudly rocking Cloudflare shirts after bringing this project to life.}

Next, we have several name options for this new wall of entropy. Help us decide the best one, and register your vote using this form.

The Surf Board

Chaos Reef

Waves of Entropy

Wall of Waves

Whirling Wave Wall

Chaotic Wave Wall

Waves of Chaos

If you’re interested in working in Cloudflare’s Lisbon office, we’re hiring! Our career page lists our open roles in Lisbon, as well as our other locations in the U.S., Mexico, Europe and Asia.

^{Acknowledgements: This project was only possible with the effort, vision and help of John Graham-Cumming, Caroline Quick, Jen Preston, Laura Atwall, Carolina Beja, Hughes Wave Motion Machines, P4 Planning and Project Management, Gensler Europe, Openbook Architecture, and Vector Mais.}