Cloudflare's one-command localhost tunnel goes viral five years later

Cloudflare's Quick Tunnels feature, shipped in 2021, resurfaced among developers: the command cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8000 exposes a local project at a public trycloudflare.com address with no account, DNS records or port forwarding. The URL dies with the process, but it is public, and criminals have long abused free anonymous tunnels to stage malware.

• cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8000 publishes a local app at trycloudflare.com
• No account, DNS records or router configuration required
• The public URL stops working once the process is killed
• Anonymous tunnels have been abused for malware staging for years