Cloudflare announced Adaptive Intelligence, a continuous detection engine integrated into Cloudflare Bot Management that is designed to adapt to changing automated attack techniques in real time.
According to the company, Adaptive Intelligence analyses traffic signals across Cloudflare’s network and generates short-lived rules to detect and block emerging automated threats. The system is designed to continuously retrain its machine learning model using live traffic rather than relying solely on scheduled security updates.
The company said the system can generate targeted rules that change as attack patterns evolve, analyse behaviour across multiple timeframes to identify slower automated attacks such as credential stuffing and scraping, and combine browser-level session behaviour with network telemetry to distinguish malicious automation from legitimate users.
Adaptive Intelligence also includes automated testing of security updates against live traffic before deployment, with the aim of reducing false positives and avoiding downtime.
“Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero. To stop modern bot threats, you have to flip the economics on the attackers. Traditional defenses offer a static target that threat actors can systematically solve. Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence creates a moving target—rendering an attacker’s engineering efforts obsolete before their operation can ever achieve scale,” said Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare.