On Tuesday last week at 7:30pm, Cloudflare, the world’s largest Internet infrastructure provider offering Web security and traffic acceleration services, had a major crash.
The outage brought down critical online services worldwide, including several essential public and government Web sites in Taiwan, for 45 minutes. The incident was no minor network glitch — it was a serious reminder of digital national security concerns, a global issue Taiwan must be especially alert of.
Having long been a target of Chinese cyberattacks, Taiwan’s dependence on Cloudflare is very risky. The risks include distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which targets are flooded with junk traffic from multiple sources to paralyze the Web site.
Cloudflare provides a shield against such attacks, so it is used by many government agencies, social media platforms, payment service providers, e-commerce sites and artificial intelligence platforms in Taiwan as a first line of defense.
As a result, Taiwan’s Internet security increasingly relies on a single company. Cloudflare also provides an entire ecosystem of Web infrastructure on which Taiwan depends. These include content delivery networks (CDN) for faster Web performance, web application firewalls (WAF) to protect against cyberattacks and malicious traffic, domain name system (DNS) services to translate Web site addresses into IP addresses, reverse proxy servers which sit between a Web site and its visitors to filter user requests, and edge points-of-presence (PoP) where network access points are hosted at physical locations closer to end-users.
A malfunction of any of these services is enough to shut down a significant number of Taiwanese Web sites. Last week’s crash made it clear that Taiwan cannot afford for Cloudflare to fail. This represents a serious geopolitical risk. Cloudflare houses a major edge PoP in Taipei for processing local Web traffic.
Lying well within China’s potential range of attack, if it were targeted or disabled in a conflict, there would be no need to attack Taiwanese servers directly. Taking out that node alone could paralyze government Web sites, payment application programming interfaces (APIs), public service portals, news platforms, and medical and transport information systems simultaneously.
Network breakages are the fastest, most cost-effective and efficient weapons of information warfare. Yet, local government, central ministries and public service platforms all rely on Cloudflare’s firewall, CDN and Reverse Proxy services for speed and security — these act to screen and filter incoming Web traffic and user requests, distinguishing between advertisers, potential cyberattacks and ordinary users.
If this frontline guardrail falls, Taiwan’s government Web sites go down with it. To prevent the nation from becoming a victim of its overdependency, there are three reforms it could apply to level up digital national security.
First, government and critical infrastructure must adopt a multi-vendor architecture approach to Web operations. There must be at least two functional sets of CDN, DNS, WAF and edge PoP systems that can switch over automatically in the event of an outage. This would mean that if Cloudflare fails, traffic is rerouted to the “failover” system.
Second, Taiwan must develop national CDN and DNS systems that do not rely on private companies or foreign servers for government and public service Web infrastructure. Critical information systems must be localized to insulate against the effects of network failures overseas. Estonia and Israel already have such systems in place. Taiwan cannot afford to fall further behind.
Third, a wartime digital resilience plan that includes interregional backups of government information systems, such as mirror Web sites hosted offshore or overseas, must be established. Essential APIs for power, healthcare and transportation should be decoupled, and emergency broadcast channels must be established for when the Internet is down.
Each of these are essential measures of modern national security, and in a crisis, lives would depend on it.
The Cloudflare crash was a test case. Next time, the outage might not be due to a system error, but a cyberattack. It might not last just 45 minutes, but four or five hours.
In the face of rising authoritarianism, great powers could turn to militarization, but small countries must rely on resilience. Taiwan must reclaim control over its critical Web infrastructure and ensure that, in the event of future shocks, it cannot be so easily toppled.
Hsiao Hsi-huei is a freelance writer.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
When former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) first took office in 2016, she set ambitious goals for remaking the energy mix in Taiwan. At the core of this effort was a significant expansion of the percentage of renewable energy generated to keep pace with growing domestic and global demands to reduce emissions. This effort met with broad bipartisan support as all three major parties placed expanding renewable energy at the center of their energy platforms. However, over the past several years partisanship has become a major headwind in realizing a set of energy goals that all three parties profess to want. Tsai
An elderly mother and her daughter were found dead in Kaohsiung after having not been seen for several days, discovered only when a foul odor began to spread and drew neighbors’ attention. There have been many similar cases, but it is particularly troubling that some of the victims were excluded from the social welfare safety net because they did not meet eligibility criteria. According to media reports, the middle-aged daughter had sought help from the local borough warden. Although the warden did step in, many services were unavailable without out-of-pocket payments due to issues with eligibility, leaving the warden’s hands
There is a modern roadway stretching from central Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa, to the partially recognized state’s Egal International Airport. Emblazoned on a gold plaque marking the road’s inauguration in July last year, just below the flags of Somaliland and the Republic of China (ROC), is the road’s official name: “Taiwan Avenue.” The first phase of construction of the upgraded road, with new sidewalks and a modern drainage system to reduce flooding, was 70 percent funded by Taipei, which contributed US$1.85 million. That is a relatively modest sum for the effect on international perception, and
At the end of last year, a diplomatic development with consequences reaching well beyond the regional level emerged. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as a sovereign state, paving the way for political, economic and strategic cooperation with the African nation. The diplomatic breakthrough yields, above all, substantial and tangible benefits for the two countries, enhancing Somaliland’s international posture, with a state prepared to champion its bid for broader legitimacy. With Israel’s support, Somaliland might also benefit from the expertise of Israeli companies in fields such as mineral exploration and water management, as underscored by Israeli Minister of
RSS