2026-06-19 · cloudflare
Cloudflare marked 12 years of Project Galileo by releasing its first comprehensive report on cyberattacks targeting civil society organizations. The report covers more than 3,400 protected domains across 120 countries, including journalists, human rights groups, nonprofits, and public-interest archives. The findings reinforce why critical records should not depend only on live web infrastructure. When attackers use DDoS, phishing, and vulnerability exploitation to silence organizations, offline copies and cold storage become a resilience layer, not a luxury.
Cloudflare reported that civil society organizations were targeted more frequently and often more intensely than other Internet users. The report says DDoS attacks were the most common threat, some lasting days or weeks, while civil society groups faced website exploitation attempts at more than seven times the rate of other Cloudflare customers.
For journalism, human rights, and evidence-preservation projects, downtime can mean lost access to public records at the exact moment they matter most. If the same environment also stores the only working copy of documents, media, or case files, a successful compromise can become permanent loss rather than a temporary outage.
Cold storage keeps authoritative copies offline and outside the blast radius of web-facing attacks. Even if a site is knocked offline, defaced, or compromised, organizations can restore from immutable archives instead of trusting the attacked production environment.
Read Original Post →