Cloudflare provides security by hiding the specific IP address of your origin web server and serving as a reverse proxy for your web traffic. All requests to and from your origin flow through Cloudflare and as these requests pass through their network, they can apply various rules and optimizations to improve security, performance, and reliability. Cloudflare also stops malicious traffic before it reaches your origin web server by automatically mitigating security risks using their WAF and DDoS protection.

Cloudflare is designed to speed up and secure any website by duplicating it on another server location and redirecting your traffic to it. The system works somewhat like a content delivery network (CDN), but it is intended to be much easier to setup and configure.

Can a hacker bypass cloudflare?

Hackers may find a way to connect directly to your server’s IP address instead of using the domain name. This would bypass Cloudflare and the protections it offers. However, Cloudflare provides a number of security features that make it difficult for hackers to bypass their security measures. For example, Cloudflare provides DDoS protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF) which can help prevent attacks from reaching your server.

Can a hacker discover IP address of web servers

According to Statista, 64% of websites wer running in the 3 main cloud providers. Therefore, there is a good chance the web server for your web application behind a proxy is one of these three cloud providers. For instance, assuming the web site is hosted on an AWS server, One way is to use the dig command (on Linux machines) or ping command on both Windows and Linux to find out the IP address of the host. Another way is to connect to port 80 (or 443 with SSL engaged) of that IP and make an HTTP request (with the hostname that might be known) and see what they say. There are several ways to containing the risk to your website. One way is to monitor your website traffic and look for unusual spikes in traffic or requests. Another way is to use a Web Application Firewall (WAF) which can help protect your website from common attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Or you can do a continuous scan of your website's subdomains and endpoints to identify vulnerabilities.