{"id":259236,"date":"2026-05-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/ftm-ditches-us-cybersecurity-firm-over-surveillance-and-privacy-fears-follow-the-money\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T00:25:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T04:25:10","slug":"ftm-ditches-us-cybersecurity-firm-over-surveillance-and-privacy-fears-follow-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/ftm-ditches-us-cybersecurity-firm-over-surveillance-and-privacy-fears-follow-the-money\/","title":{"rendered":"FTM ditches US cybersecurity firm over surveillance and privacy fears – Follow the Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

FTM ditches US cybersecurity firm over surveillance and privacy fears – Follow the Money<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.ftm.eu\/articles\/why-ftm-is-giving-up-cloudflare<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-30 00:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.ftm.eu<\/a><\/p>\n

At 11:55 am on a Wednesday morning, the first message came in. A Follow the Money editor sent a screenshot of the FTM app via the internal communication channels: \u201c502 bad gateway\u201d. Just a minute later, then-editor-in-chief Arne van der Wal sent the message: \u201cSITE IS DOWN\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An hour later, the website and app were still down. \u201cLooks like a targeted DDoS attack on us,\u201d FTM\u2019s systems administrator told the rest of the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During a DDoS attack \u2013 short for distributed denial-of-service \u2013 attackers send massive amounts of internet traffic at their target until the system is overloaded. The aim? To bring down websites, at least temporarily.<\/p>\n

Later that day, FTM publisher Jan-Willem Sanders sent a message to staff: \u201cA massive amount of automated traffic is being directed at us to disrupt our sites \u2013 unfortunately, that mission has been successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cUnder attack?\u201d<\/p>\n

The attack, on 24 April 2024, was the first the company had ever experienced. On that day, the servers had to cope with traffic that was 28,000 times higher than on a normal Wednesday, originating from servers in Russia and Bulgaria. One of the pages that was attacked? The section on the website that collects articles on Russia.<\/p>\n

That afternoon, the FTM system administrator scrambled to connect the website to Cloudflare\u2019s services. That firm provides a popular service: The US company \u201cblocks an average of 247 billion threats online every single day for its millions of customers\u201d, according to its website. Independent research found that almost a quarter of all websites on the internet are protected by Cloudflare.<\/p>\n

An added bonus: you can connect your systems to it in a flash \u2013 even during an attack. It\u2019s no coincidence that the website features a red \u201cunder attack?\u201d button; click it, enter your details, and you\u2019ll be protected by Cloudflare \u201cin minutes\u201d.<\/p>\n

Disrupting sites<\/h2>\n

Although Cloudflare managed to block 99% of the Russian…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FTM ditches US cybersecurity firm over surveillance and privacy fears – Follow the Money https:\/\/www.ftm.eu\/articles\/why-ftm-is-giving-up-cloudflare…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":259238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.ftm.eu\/uploads\/media_filter\/6a15d8702a843\/article_1400_nocrop\/cloudfare.jpg?v=0","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259236"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259239,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259236\/revisions\/259239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}