Cloudflare and Mastercard Partner to Fight Cyber Threats

Cloudflare and Mastercard have announced a strategic partnership to develop cybersecurity tools aimed at protecting small businesses, governments, and critical infrastructure from growing digital threats.

The partnership will combine Mastercard’s attack surface monitoring capabilities from its Recorded Future and RiskRecon units with Cloudflare’s Application Security portfolio. The goal is to give millions of organizations a single unified solution to identify, prioritize, and address hidden security risks across their internet-facing systems.

As organizations adopt more vendors, outsourced services, and new technologies, their digital attack surface grows harder to manage. Shadow IT, legacy systems, and third-party services can create blind spots that leave security teams unaware of exposed assets. This visibility gap gives threat actors an opening to exploit vulnerabilities before they are detected or addressed.

The joint solution is designed to tackle this problem in three key ways. First, it will allow organizations to discover any internet-facing domains or software running on the web and immediately apply security protections to unmonitored assets. Second, it will provide a continuously updated view of an organization’s security posture, including an A-to-F security rating based on checks across software vulnerabilities, authentication weaknesses, exposed infrastructure, and third-party risks. These findings will appear in a prioritized dashboard with context on severity. Third, it will allow users to directly activate security controls such as web application firewalls, encryption, and automated defenses from within the Cloudflare dashboard.

Small businesses and public sector organizations are frequently targeted by cybercriminals at higher rates than large enterprises, despite having fewer resources to defend themselves. Small businesses alone represent roughly half of global GDP, making their security a significant concern for the broader economy. The partnership is specifically intended to serve these underserved groups, who face existential risks from successful cyberattacks rather than merely operational disruptions.