Cloudflare, Inc. and Mastercard Incorporated have entered a strategic partnership aimed at developing integrated cybersecurity tools that help small businesses, critical infrastructure operators, and governments defend against modern cyber threats while maintaining rapid innovation.
As organizations adopt emerging technologies, outsourced services, shadow IT, and legacy systems to innovate and scale, their attack surfaces expand and become harder to monitor. This creates blind spots that threat actors exploit. The Cloudflare-Mastercard partnership addresses this by merging Mastercard’s expertise in attack surface intelligence with Cloudflare’s robust application-layer security.
The combined offering allows users to discover all internet-facing domains and software stacks via Recorded Future. When unprotected assets are identified, organizations can instantly apply Cloudflare’s Application Security controls to secure them.
“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.”
The solution provides a continuously updated, comprehensive view of cyber posture powered by Recorded Future, integrated into Cloudflare’s Security Insights dashboard. Assets receive an “A–F” security rating based on multiple checks, including software vulnerabilities, weak authentication, exposed infrastructure, and third-party risks. Findings are prioritized according to asset criticality and severity.
Organizations can then activate protective measures—such as web application firewall rules, encryption, or automated defenses—directly from the Cloudflare dashboard to mitigate identified risks swiftly.
"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."
This collaboration equips resource-constrained organizations with enterprise-grade visibility and protection, enabling secure innovation in an increasingly interconnected threat landscape.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is the leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business. Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations—from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.
About Mastercard
Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re building a resilient economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.
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