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Zero Wire on Cloudflare Radar: One Hub for Critical Vulnerabilities

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Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

Today Cloudflare has a new service for everyone on a security team. When a critical CVE hits the news first thing in the morning, you want to quickly answer, "Does this affect us?" Zero Wire is built for that moment.

What was announced?

In the Cloudflare Blog, Cloudflare introduced Zero Wire. It is a public vulnerability intelligence feed inside Cloudflare Radar, Cloudflare's security section.

For each significant vulnerability, it publishes a short "briefing" so you can judge the impact and decide what to do next. It is meant to complement vendor advisories and vulnerability databases, not replace them.

It has two kinds of readers in mind:

  • Executives and security leaders: they need to understand what is happening, fast
  • Engineers: they need a path to technical remediation

Why it matters

Each source of vulnerability information answers a different question. A vendor advisory tells you which versions are affected and how to fix them. An exploitation report tells you whether attackers are active.

Zero Wire brings these sources together and shows severity and evidence of active exploitation separately, because you need both to decide.

What changes

When a critical CVE appears, you no longer have to hop between sites and stitch information together. One briefing covers:

  • A plain-language overview of the impact
  • Which teams should investigate
  • Recommended actions, plus links to evidence and vendor guidance

The homepage is split into "Needs attention" (issues that need active assessment, such as known exploitation or developing guidance) and "Reference" (briefings whose guidance has stabilized), so it is clear what to look at first!

Dive Deep

What is in a briefing

One briefing can cover several related CVEs. Here is what you will find:

  • Status and last-checked date: shows how fresh the information is
  • What to do now: a short action list, such as identifying affected deployments, checking versions with hosting providers, applying vendor updates, reviewing suspicious activity, and keeping compensating controls in place while patching
  • Evidence: links to CVE records, research, and exploitation evidence, including CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog
  • Charts (where available): for example, HTTP request volume matching Cloudflare WAF managed rules over time
  • Chronology: a record of important developments, like new advisories or changes in evidence and guidance
  • Cloudflare section: whether a compensating control exists, its availability, configuration requirements, and dashboard links (for paid and free plans)
  • AI assessment prompt: a ready-made prompt you can give to an AI agent to request a read-only assessment

The AI prompt asks for deployed software, relevant vendor fixes, exposure, compensating controls, per-asset evidence, unknowns, and next actions. Copying it does not scan or change anything. It is guidance for your own investigation.

Data sources

  • Cloudflare's security research
  • Observations from Cloudflare's network, such as traffic matching WAF rules that may indicate exploitation attempts
  • Vendor advisories
  • CVE records and external research
  • Exploitation evidence, including CISA's KEV catalog

Scope and limits

The article draws clear lines, so keep these in mind!

  • It does not catalog every CVE. It focuses on significant critical issues in Internet-facing software
  • A Cloudflare WAF rule is not required for inclusion. Some issues need vendor updates or changes beyond the traffic Cloudflare can inspect
  • A WAF mitigation is a compensating control for the traffic it covers. It does not replace fixing vulnerable software, and it cannot undo actions already taken at the origin
  • Observed attack attempts do not prove that a specific organization was compromised. The absence of observed attempts on Cloudflare's network does not prove exploitation is absent elsewhere
  • WAF chart volumes are not counts of compromised systems or successful exploits. They indicate how much threat actors are focused on a vulnerability
  • "Reference" does not mean all affected systems have been patched
  • The dashboard link does not enable a rule or verify a deployment. You need to review your own WAF configuration

Example: php2shell

The article highlights a briefing called php2shell. It concerns flaws in the PHP runtime. Updating application code or a plugin (for example, in WordPress or Magento) does not fix the runtime itself. The briefing points to the PHP security guidance for affected versions and remediation, and includes a chart of HTTP requests matching WAF rules over time.

Wrap-up

  • Zero Wire is a public briefing feed on Cloudflare Radar focused on critical vulnerabilities
  • Each briefing bundles a plain-language overview, responsible teams, recommended actions, and evidence links
  • It separates severity from evidence of exploitation, and sorts items into "Needs attention" and "Reference"
  • WAF mitigations are compensating controls, not a substitute for fixing the software
  • It does not cover every CVE, and it complements existing advisories

This one is for security teams, and for infrastructure and web engineers who need to decide quickly where to start when a critical vulnerability lands!