MICHELLE ZATLYN
Co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare
Leading Through Tough Times
AImost immediately after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that led to the war in Gaza, another battle was brewing. Hackers first went after the Israeli internet with DDoS attacks, deluging websites that provide critical alerts and information to civilians. Cyberattackers then went after Palestinian sites, too-particularly in the banking sector.
Michelle Zatlyn, 44, was on the virtual frontlines. Within 12 minutes of the initial rocket assaults, the San Francisco-based company she co-founded, Cloudflare, detected and began mitigating attacks from hackers, presumed to be state actors, as well as civilians and so-called hacktivists, according to legal experts. In the weeks that followed, the company, which provides cybersecurity services to about 20 percent of the world's websites, automatically identified and stopped DDoS attacks that amounted to five billion site requests.
For Zatlyn, taking sides in the conflict wasn't an option. "Whether sites were run by Palestinians or Israelis, we said, 'Hey, if you need cybersecurity, we are here to help you,'" she says. "Organizations, schools, governments were under attack; our employees were onboarding them in a very quick fashion and making sure that they could securely stay online."
The company has for years applied its "better-internet" mission to giving away its services to groups in need; it runs three major internal programs that help protect and provide free security to schools and humanitarian aid organizations, among others. Together, they guard more than 2,900 web properties, and Cloudflare estimates it has invested $48.5 million in the initiatives over the past six years. But the team's effort in the past year had never felt more urgent.
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