Cloudflare Precursor Watches Your Mouse and Keyboard To Decide If You Are Human
2 74BrianFagioli writes: Cloudflare has launched Precursor, a new behavioral bot detection system that monitors mouse movement, typing cadence, scrolling, clipboard activity, page visibility, and other signals across an entire browsing session. The system is designed to catch advanced bots that can run JavaScript, use real browsers, and pass traditional CAPTCHA challenges. Cloudflare says Precursor does not record actual keystrokes and instead studies timing and rhythm. The company also says the data is not tied to user identities or persistent profiles. Even so, software that watches how people move and type throughout a visit raises privacy concerns, especially as Cloudflare claims bots now generate roughly 57 percent of all Internet requests.
2 comments
Re: People do the same. (Score: 5, Interesting)
by clive27 ( 889511 ) on Monday July 13, 2026 @02:17PM (#66236572)
Sounds incredibly easy for bots to add some randomness to its movements and typing speed.
Re:whitelist sites that don't use Cloudflare (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Rujiel ( 1632063 ) on Monday July 13, 2026 @03:11PM (#66236708)
This overlooks the spam traffic coming from cloudflare. Also cloudflare was an actual intelligence project (quoted here):
https://www.devever.net/~hl/cl... [devever.net]
"Back in 2003, Lee Holloway and I started Project Honey Pot as an open-source project to track online fraud and abuse. The Project allowed anyone with a website to install a piece of code and track hackers and spammers. We ran it as a hobby and didn't think much about it until, in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security called and said, 'Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?' That started us thinking about how we could effectively deploy the data from Project Honey Pot, as well as other sources, in order to protect websites online. That turned into the initial impetus for CloudFlare."