More bots, more trees

In 2019, Cloudflare launched Bot Fight Mode to deter malicious bots online by redirecting them to a challenge page requiring computationally intensive tasks. The company accounts for the carbon cost of this process by planting trees through its partnership with One Tree Planted. This year, they observed that bot operators are giving up quickly and moving on to other targets due to the increased bill associated with their CPU-intensive challenges. Bot Fight Mode is now busier than ever, issuing six times more CPU intensive challenges per day compared to last year, thanks to a new detection system written using Cloudflare's ruleset engine. In 2023, they plan to give everyone the ability to write their own flexible Bot Fight Mode rules. Additionally, due to the success of Bot Fight Mode, Cloudflare has contributed over 35,000 trees to restoration projects in Nova Scotia and West Bengal, India.