CloudFlare Feb 2017 Parser Bug and its Impact

  • Friday, 24th February, 2017
  • 16:17pm
Many KartHost hosting clients are using CloudFlare to speed up their sites as well as add futhter protection to their sites. KartHost was made aware today of a parser bug issue with CloudFlare. KartHost being a CloudFlare Partner Matthew Prince this morning sent over an email to KartHost regarding all our clients using CloudFlare services (If you have a specific account with CloudFlare you should receieve a similar email regarding this issue):

Dear Cloudflare Customer:

Thursday afternoon, we published a blog post describing a memory leak caused by a serious bug that impacted Cloudflare's systems. If you haven't yet, I encourage you to read that post on the bug:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/

While we resolved the bug within hours of it being reported to us, there was an ongoing risk that some of our customers' sensitive information could still be available through third party caches, such as the Google search cache.

Over the last week, we've worked with these caches to discover what customers may have had sensitive information exposed and ensure that the caches are purged. We waited to disclose the bug publicly until after these caches could be cleared in order to mitigate the ability of malicious individuals to exploit any exposed data.

In our review of these third party caches, we discovered data that had been exposed from approximately 150 of Cloudflare's customers across our Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. We have reached out to these customers directly to provide them with a copy of the data that was exposed, help them understand its impact, and help them mitigate that impact.

Fortunately, your domain is not one of the domains where we have discovered exposed data in any third party caches. The bug has been patched so it is no longer leaking data. However, we continue to work with these caches to review their records and help them purge any exposed data we find. If we discover any data leaked about your domains during this search, we will reach out to you directly and provide you full details of what we have found.

To date, we have yet to find any instance of the bug being exploited, but we recommend if you are concerned that you invalidate and reissue any persistent secrets, such as long lived session identifiers, tokens or keys. Due to the nature of the bug, customer SSL keys were not exposed and do not need to be rotated.

Again, if we discover new information that impacts you, we will reach out to you directly. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Matthew Prince
Cloudflare, Inc.
Co-founder and CEO

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