Cloudflare blocks Sonic IP address

[jiceman]

When I attempt to visit the webpage of a Paris department store called BHV, I have not been able for the past few weeks. It seems that Cloudflare is protecting this website from Sonic.

https://www.bhv.fr/

I am unable to find a contact email address for BHV. Anything that Sonic can do?

Sorry, you have been blocked
You are unable to access bhv.fr
Why have I been blocked?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

Basically just entered the website into the address bar, so nothing unusual. Is everyone using Sonic blocked? I don't know how many of us share this public IP address.

[loherj]

Thank you so much for reaching out about the inability to reach this site.

I tested this on my connection and can not access the site either. I believe this is just the website owner blocking traffic but not specific to Sonic being blocked. However, I would compile this information into an email and send it to support@sonic.net so we can take a closer look at this.

I would also advise editing this post to redact your IP address or delete it and re-post it without your IP address.

[jiceman]

OK. I removed the IP address, even if not sure of the harm.

I guess I was not aware of how Sonic allocated IP address. Does it give each of us a unique address? My understanding is that for most large ISPs, customers share a group of addresses (with different ports).

Thank you for confirming that you cannot reach the site either. Perhaps BHV's cloudflare setup is misconfigured. I also tried them when on my corporate VPN and it is also blocked there.

[virtualmike]

I'm accessing via another ISP, and I'm also being blocked. I also tried after enabling Google 1 VPN, and that connection is blocked, as well.

I suspect the web site and/or Cloudflare has a misconfiguration, or perhaps BHV doesn't want people access from the USA or from outside of France.

FYI, with most ISPs, including Sonic, each customer has their own IP address. However, all the devices within the customer's home or business (assuming there is a router) will share the external IP address, as far as the outside world is concerned. In other words, if you visit a site with your computer and visit the same site with your iPad, that site will see two different devices with the same IP address.

Within a home or business, each device will have its own IP address, used for communications with other devices and the router. When a device wants to contact an outside site/service, the router gets the request and notes which internal device made the connection, and forwards the request to the outside service, telling that service which port (on the router) should get the response. When the outside service responds, the router will direct that response to the correct device, based on the port to which the response was sent.

Most Sonic customers have dynamic IP addresses, which means they're assigned by a DHCP server when the router requests it (typically after the router is powered on). In many (most?) cases, the router will continually be assigned the same IP address, but there's no guarantee. I've often seen that switching to a new router will get a new IP address, and reverting to the old router will lead to getting the previous IP address, but that's also not guaranteed--there are a bunch of factors that control this.

The reason you don't want to post your IP address is that it allows people to connect the dots. Suppose you visited a web page where the server was managed by someone with malicious intent. That person does a web search on the IP addresses of people visiting the sites hosted there. That person now can connect the IP address with your Sonic login name. I'll let you imagine what can happen from there.