Cloudflare can now send DDoS alerts for sites are under attack

Cloudflare now allows paid customers to create notifications that warn them when their sites are under a DDoS attack.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is when an attacker floods a web server or an Internet connection with more requests than it can handle. This flooding of requests causes the service to become unavailable, and the company or person experiences an outage.

Cloudflare has always offered DDoS protection as one of its core offerings, but unless a site owner or administrator were actively using their site or using monitoring tools, they would not know that their service was under attack until it was too late.

Yesterday, Cloudflare announced that all paid customers can now configure alerts that notify them when a site they manage is under a DDoS attack.

Depending on the paid account you have at Cloudflare, you can receive notifications through email or PageDuty.

There are also different DDoS types that you can receive - HTTPS DDoS and L3/L4 attacks. The availability of each type of alert depends on what service you are using with Cloudflare.

When a DDoS attack occurs, Cloudflare will notify you when the attack was detected, the DDoS attack type, how large of an attack it is, and what the target is, as shown below.

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not provide a way to create a test notification to see how the alert will work with custom notification systems or SMS texts.

How to create a Cloudflare DDoS alert

To create a Cloudflare DDoS notification, please follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard at https://dash.cloudflare.com.
2. At the top of the dashboard, click on the 'Notifications' section.
3. In the Notifications section, click on the 'Create' button.
4. Select the DDoS notification type that you wish to create an alert. For most customers using Cloudflare to protect a website, you will only see 'HTTP DDoS Attack Alert.' When done, click on the 'Next' button.
5. At the next screen, give the notification a name and optional description. Then add some email addresses or other notification methods that the alert should use.
6. When done, press the 'Create' button to finish setting up the notification.

Once an alert has been created, when Cloudflare detects that your site or service is under DDoS attack, it will send out the notification.