Cloudflare and Mastercard Partner to Extend Comprehensive Cyber Defense Across Critical Infrastructure and Small Businesses

WHY THIS MATTERS: The convergence of Cloudflare’s application security expertise with Mastercard’s robust intelligence capabilities, drawn from Recorded Future and RiskRecon, signals a pivotal moment in the fight for global cyber resilience. This partnership is significant because it is designed to extend enterprise-grade Attack Surface Monitoring to organizations historically considered “target rich but resource poor,” namely small businesses, governments, and critical infrastructure. The core innovation lies in eliminating blind spots by autonomously discovering unknown, internet-facing assets—a common issue referred to as ‘shadow IT’—and instantly securing them via a single, unified dashboard. For the broader fintech and financial services ecosystem, this represents the essential trend of embedding security directly into the digital infrastructure, ensuring that innovation and scaling can happen rapidly without leaving crippling visibility gaps for threat actors to exploit. Closing this gap is foundational to securing the global economy

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, and Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE: MA) announced a strategic partnership with the intent to develop tools to help small businesses, critical infrastructure, and governments protect themselves from today’s most pressing cyber threats without putting the brakes on innovation.

Attack surface monitoring capabilities from Mastercard’s Recorded Future and RiskRecon, paired with Cloudflare’s Application Security portfolio, will be designed to allow millions of organizations to defend against the risks posed by an increasingly interconnected digital world. From one unified solution, users will gain the ability to map, prioritize, and automate swift remediation of hidden risks across their internet-facing environments.

Emerging technologies and tools pose opportunities for organizations to innovate at speed and find creative ways to scale their businesses. But as new vendors, outsourced services, shadow IT, and legacy systems are layered into business environments, the attack surface becomes unknown, and security teams are often left in the dark. This presents a potential visibility gap that could allow threat actors to gain the upper hand. Organizations now require cyber defense that allows them to innovate as fast as they want, with the necessary safeguards in place to protect critical information. 

“Improving critical infrastructure cybersecurity and reducing cyber risk is an ongoing, challenging mission,” said Dan Cimpean, Director of the Romanian National Cyber Security Directorate. “As society and global economies increasingly rely on digital networks, we must combine our efforts across the public and private sectors, across nations and international organizations, to build resilience and prevent cyber incidents. The protection of critical infrastructure is and must be a joint effort.” 

Cloudflare and Mastercard intend to help protect small businesses, critical infrastructure, and governments by:

• Eliminating blind spots: Users will be able to monitor their digital presence by discovering any internet-facing domains or software stacks running on the web through Recorded Future. When unprotected assets are identified, organizations will be able to immediately extend Cloudflare’s Application Security Portfolio to secure these shadow assets.
• Providing real-time, accurate views of cyber posture: Companies will have access to a comprehensive, continuously updated view of their cyber posture powered by Recorded Future. This includes an “A–F” graded security rating based on several checks for security controls across software vulnerabilities, authentication weaknesses, exposed infrastructure, and third-party risks. These findings will appear in Cloudflare’s Security Insights dashboard, prioritized by the asset’s criticality, with added context on severity.
• Translating risk insights into actionable protection: Organizations will have the ability to enable security controls – such as a web application firewall, encryption, or automated defenses – to mitigate identified risks through the Cloudflare dashboard.

“For small businesses, critical infrastructure, and governments, a cyberattack is more than a technical hurdle. It is an existential threat. Often considered ‘target rich but resource poor,’ these organizations are strategic targets and are often attacked at a greater rate than global enterprise or Fortune 500 organizations,” said Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare. “This partnership brings together the best in cyber defense so that these underserved organizations don’t fall victim to the growing number of cyberattacks. 

“With small businesses accounting for about half of the world’s GDP, closing the resilience gap is critical to securing the foundation of our global economy,” said Johan Gerber, global head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. “Our collaboration with Cloudflare propels our mission to secure the digital ecosystem in partnership with governments and other key players, empowering businesses to focus on what matters most: their productivity and growth.”

To learn more about the Mastercard and Cloudflare offerings, please visit:

• Cloudflare Web Application Security (WAF)
• Mastercard RiskRecon and Recorded Future 

FF NEWS TAKE: This collaboration is a clear “move the needle” development, effectively democratizing advanced cyber defense for the backbone of the global economy. By translating risk insights into actionable, automated security controls and providing a clear “A–F” security rating, the solution standardizes and simplifies what has traditionally been a complex, manual process. The industry must now watch how swiftly this partnership drives the adoption of objective, real-time security grading as a compulsory element of vendor due diligence, fundamentally tightening supply chain risk and raising the baseline for digital protection globally.

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