The TLDR; 10 days ago I was banned from Cloudflare allegedly for "phishing". I have never phished, nor used Cloudflare to proxy illegal content.
I am a long time HN user but I created a throwaway account to avoid being linked to my employer.
10 days ago I got an email saying my account was suspended for "phishing". I contacted Cloudflare support immediately and within 60 seconds I got a reply saying my account was permanently banned with no further information. I think this was an automated response. I followed up explaining my account had never been used for "phishing" and it hosted a number of small businesses and would they reinstate it. I never got a reply.
My downfall must been related to Cloudflare Workers. I used it to create some apps including proxies that modified mainstream news websites. They acted as uBlock + Stylish for locked down computers where I could not install browser extensions. I did not share these with anyone, but I did not secure them with HTTP auth. I didn't think anyone could guess the xyz.abc.workers.dev URLs to access the proxies but automated software must have detected them and flagged them as phishing sites.
I was too clever for my own good, but I was not malicious, I did not abuse the Cloudflare platform and I never phished. I just created an application for my own personal use. I do not think any Clouldflare engineer looking at my Worker code would think it was malicious in any way. My account had current billing details and I was a paying customer in the past.
Lessons learnt: Don't be clever and security is ALWAYS important.
I would like to continue using Cloudflare. I worry I will be banned from their other services. If I was blocked at an IP level, it would be far more devastating than being permanently blocked by Google.
If anyone can help me, even just to clear my name, I would very grateful to you.
Strange, Cloudflare has an official worker template to do just that (sans modifications): https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/templates/pages/bu... Sounds like officially endorsed use case to me.
In fact I was thinking about doing the same the other day, but haven't gotten around to it...
What kind of lesson is that, we wouldn't have the internet as we know if people just followed the rules. If anything this signals that cloudflare is yet another huge company that can just shit on you with little recourse.