The 2023 jabber.ru Attack Exposes a Critical Cloudflare Flaw in 2026 - Osipov, David, Zurabovich, MSc, 1993-08-17 (2025)
A deep-dive into how Cloudflare's Universal SSL undermines RFC 8657, creating a security gap exposing millions of domains to MitM attacks.
This investigation began after my own failed attempt to implement RFC 8657 CAA records on my Cloudflare-hosted domains. When I discovered that Cloudflare was silently *overwriting* my security-hardened CAA records, I realized millions of free-tier users were unknowingly vulnerable to the same MitM attack that compromised jabber.ru in 2023. After a month of silence from Cloudflare's community team, followed by a dismissive response citing 'standard adoption timelines,' I knew this issue needed broader exposure. My subsequent article on Habr.com became the week's top post, confirming the community's concern about this artificial security gap.
Content tier: Briefing
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Keywords: Blog posts; Cloudflare; Let's Encrypt; RFC 8657; Border Gateway Protocol; Man-in-the-middle Attack; Government hacking; dns; caa; rfc-8657; cloudflare; mitm; security-analysis; lets-encrypt; expert consumer; archive; bgp-hijacking; rfc-8659; valdikss; jabber.ru; http-01; dns-01; Cybersecurity