Cloudflare and Mastercard Partner to Protect Small Businesses and Critical Infrastructure from Cyber Threats

Cloudflare and Mastercard have announced a strategic partnership aimed at strengthening cybersecurity for small businesses, critical infrastructure, and government organizations. The collaboration focuses on helping organizations identify and secure hidden cyber risks without slowing down innovation and digital growth.

The partnership combines cyber risk intelligence and attack surface monitoring tools from Mastercard’s Recorded Future and RiskRecon with Cloudflare’s Application Security platform. The integrated solution is designed to help organizations detect, prioritize, and quickly fix security risks across their internet-facing systems.

Tackling the Growing Cyber Attack Surface

As companies adopt new technologies, cloud services, third-party vendors, and legacy systems, their digital environments become more complex. This often leads to the creation of “shadow IT” and unknown internet-facing assets, which expand the organization’s attack surface. Many organizations are unaware of these vulnerabilities, creating blind spots that cybercriminals can exploit.

Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, emphasized that smaller organizations and critical infrastructure operators are especially vulnerable because they often lack the resources to manage complex cybersecurity systems, making them frequent targets for cyberattacks.

A Unified Cybersecurity Approach

The joint solution focuses on three major capabilities designed to improve cybersecurity visibility and response:

1. Eliminating Blind Spots:
Organizations will be able to identify all internet-facing assets, including unknown domains, applications, and software systems. Once vulnerabilities are identified, companies can immediately apply Cloudflare’s security protections to secure those assets.

2. Real-Time Cyber Risk Visibility:
The platform will provide organizations with a continuously updated cybersecurity rating, graded from A to F. This rating will be based on factors such as software vulnerabilities, authentication weaknesses, exposed infrastructure, and third-party risks. All insights will be displayed in Cloudflare’s Security Insights dashboard and prioritized based on risk severity.

3. Turning Insights into Action:
Organizations will be able to activate security tools such as Web Application Firewalls (WAF), encryption, and automated threat protection directly from the Cloudflare dashboard to fix identified risks quickly.

Protecting the Global Economy and Infrastructure

The partnership also highlights the importance of cybersecurity in protecting the global economy. Small businesses contribute nearly half of the world’s GDP, making them a critical part of the global financial system. A major cyberattack on these organizations could have serious economic consequences.

In addition, protecting critical infrastructure such as energy systems, telecommunications, and financial networks requires cooperation between private companies, governments, and international organizations. Cyber resilience is increasingly being seen as a shared responsibility across sectors and countries.