It’s been nearly a week since I removed Cloudflare from my sites. As a quick followup, I did get a slight surge in traffic that lasted for a day or so after a bunch of bots' DNS caches expired, but they seem to have all given up after the Cloudflare “managed challenge” interstitial turned into an HTTP 401 error for them. So, Cloudflare wasn’t even really doing anything for me anyway, and certainly wasn’t worth the problems it caused (such as being subject to its many outages and having my site become yet another source of privacy-destroying analytics and so on). In other news, the crawlers mostly seem to have gotten wise to my tarpit and now it’s only averaging around 20 requests per second, down from a peak of 310. Oh well. At some point I think I’ll replace the forced login thing with a simpler sentience check since the login thing feels a bit aggressive, although I’m not sure I can easily fit that into Publ without modifying Publ itself due to vagaries of how Flask routing works. It’d probably be nice to just make antibot measures part of Publ anyway, though. Or maybe I can abuse error 429 for this, which would probably be a better choice than error 401 anyway.

QKS Group's Bot Management market research includes a comprehensive analysis of the global market in...

QKS Group's Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Mitigation market research includes a comprehensive...

Episode Summary: Welcome back to "Upwardly Mobile"! In this episode, we dive deep into the rapidly evolving mobile threat landscape defined by the rise of "Agentic AI." With Android 17 set to transform our smartphones into active, on-device AI orchestrators by Summer 2026, the security stakes have never been higher. We unpack the alarming findings from the 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report, which highlights the total industrialization of cyber threats and how attackers are using AI as a massive force multiplier. We also explore why legacy bot defenses—like rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and behavioral biometrics—are completely failing against modern AI bots that can dynamically rewrite code and mimic human behavior with 99% accuracy. Finally, we discuss how the integration of Cloudflare's edge network with Approov's deterministic device attestation is providing the ultimate defense-in-depth architecture to stop mobile API abuse at the source. If you are attending the RSA Conference (RSAC) in San Francisco this March 2026, be sure to catch up with our sponsors at Approov to learn how to future-proof your mobile architecture! Key Takeaways: - The Android 17 Revolution: Android 17 shifts the OS from a reactive tool to an active "agent phone" that orchestrates multi-step workflows across apps. While this brings massive benefits in speed and privacy, it also dramatically expands the attack surface for prompt injections and cross-app data leakage. - The Industrialization of Cyber Threats: The 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report reveals that AI has lowered the barrier to entry for highly effective cyber operations, moving the industry toward automated, machine-speed exploits. - The Death of Legacy Bot Defenses: Legacy probabilistic defenses like WAFs and CAPTCHAs are failing because multimodal LLM agents can now solve logic puzzles and mimic human "thumb jitter" perfectly. - Cryptographic Proof of Life: To stop agentic AI, security must shift from asking "Is this a bot?" to demanding deterministic, cryptographic proof of the device and app's integrity. - A New Defense-in-Depth: Combining Cloudflare's global edge network with Approov's deep runtime analysis and "Zero Secrets" architecture ensures that only untampered, legitimate app instances can access your APIs. Sponsor Links: - Secure your Mobile APIs today: Visit https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fapproov.com to learn how to eliminate hardcoded secrets and implement deterministic device attestation. Source Materials & Further Reading: - Android 17: Android Is Becoming an Agent - Are you ready? - 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report: How adversaries are weaponizing the Internet - When the Bot Has a Brain: Defending Mobile APIs in the Era of Agentic Attackers (Approov RSAC 2026 Presentation) - See You at RSA 2026: Let's Talk Stopping Mobile API Abuse at the Source Keywords for SEO: Agentic AI, Mobile API Security, Android 17, Cloudflare Threat Report 2026, Approov, Bot Mitigation, RSA Conference 2026, Cybersecurity, Device Attestation, Zero Secrets Architecture, AI Bots, Malware Defense, Prompt Injection, API Abuse.        

In this episode of https://open.spotify.com/show/3iYLhvcx8q1QwH0jc1QSld, we dive deep into the critical, yet often underestimated, world of mobile app security. Drawing on recent research, we uncover a staggering misalignment between perception and reality, highlighting why organizations are facing an average of nine mobile app security incidents per year, with an average financial toll reaching $6.99 million in 2025. While 93% of organizations believe their mobile app protections are sufficient, a substantial 62% have experienced at least one security incident in the past year. The repercussions extend beyond financial losses, including application downtime, sensitive data leaks, erosion of consumer trust, and a diminished user experience. We explore why traditional security measures, particularly code obfuscation, are no longer enough. Obfuscation, while deterring casual attackers, is ultimately a deterrent, not a preventative measure, offering minimal protection against runtime threats, dynamic analysis, and AI-assisted reverse engineering. The real target for modern attackers is increasingly Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Mobile apps serve as entry points to exploit backend APIs for credential stuffing, data scraping, and business logic abuse, none of which static defenses can prevent. The weaponization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) further escalates these threats, enabling automated botnets, adaptive malware, and accelerated vulnerability discovery. The solution? A crucial shift towards a dynamic, runtime-centric security model rooted in Zero Trust principles. This approach demands continuous monitoring and verification, moving beyond static, pre-deployment checks to protect apps during execution. Key elements of this essential dynamic security strategy include: • https://approov.io/mobile-app-security/rasp/: Acting as the app’s internal bodyguard, RASP detects and responds to runtime threats like debuggers, tampering, root/jailbreak, and hooking frameworks, offering real-time protection and contextual awareness. • https://approov.io/mobile-app-security/rasp/app-attestation/: This is a standout feature, ensuring that only requests truly originating from your official, unmodified mobile app, running on a non-compromised device, are allowed to access your backend APIs. This effectively blocks bots, scripts, tampered apps, and mitigates API abuse. • https://approov.io/mobile-app-security/rasp/runtime-secrets/: This critical measure removes sensitive secrets (like API keys) from the app's code entirely. Instead, secrets are delivered securely at runtime, just-in-time, and only to attested apps, preventing extraction through reverse engineering. • Dynamic Channel Protection (Dynamic Pinning): Unlike brittle static certificate pinning, dynamic pinning allows for secure, over-the-air updates of certificate pins, ensuring continuous protection against Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks without requiring app store updates. We also differentiate between leading mobile app security solutions: • https://www.guardsquare.com/, with products like DexGuard and iXGuard, excels in client-side mobile app protection, focusing on code obfuscation, hardening, and RASP to make the app's code incredibly difficult to compromise on the device. • https://approov.io/ emphasizes remote mobile app attestation, performing deep, continuous inspection of the mobile app and device in the cloud. This server-side decision-making makes it significantly harder for attackers to bypass the attestation process, ensuring only genuine apps access your APIs. Approov's positive security model effectively "locks down" backend APIs. Ideally, a comprehensive mobile app security strategy leverages both types of solutions: Guardsquare for strong in-app protection, and Approov for critical API integrity and abuse prevention. This multi-layered approach, combining static and dynamic defenses, is no longer optional but a fundamental requirement for achieving adequate resilience against modern mobile threats. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Relevant Links to Source Materials: • Learn more about the research highlighting the mobile app security blindspot: "https://www.devprojournal.com/technology-trends/security/research-exposes-7m-mobile-app-security-blindspot-fueled-by-overconfidence/"  • Explore in-depth the need for dynamic defenses: "WP- Mobile Security Beyond Obfuscation v1.0 FINAL B.pdf". • Discover Approov's approach to superior mobile API protection: "https://approov.io/info/role-of-attestation-in-mobile-app-security". Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Approov. Safeguard your mobile apps and APIs with their unique, patented runtime shielding solution. Visit https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&q=https%3A%2F%2Fapproov.io to learn more.

Bots are using Google Translate to scrape e-commerce sites. This new tactic allows bots to bypass security measures by translating the content of sites before scraping it. The bots primarily target e-commerce sites to extract sensitive information.