Lookp on reCaptcha - what is the root cause

General
1

am not a user of Cloudflare as I do not maintain any web sites.

However I do use the internet to visit sites where Cloudfalre is installed
I also use a VPN service.
On Sunday 1st July I suddenly started to get reCaptcha’s on many sites that I visited. These reCaptcha were extremely long - sometimes as long a five minutes of ticking off busses, roads or roadsigns.

Then I visited bitfinex.com and I got stuck in a Loop on ReCaptcha.
I initially raised a ticket with Bitfinex but then I switched my VPN exit point and everything worked again. On investigating I found this link via google:
google chrome - How to stop cloudflare authentications when visiting a site? - Super User

I now suspect that this may be a problem that comes from me using VPN and the site has had a problem with an exit IP address that is used by my original choice of VPN server. Therefore as a defensive measure the reCatchtas started to get introduced and this affected me.
Can you confirm that this is what is happening so I can go back to my VPN service provider (as I assume one of their customers was bombarding some web sites with an automated script and so the reCaptcha’s were applied as a defensive measure).

Thank you,

Nick Morter

2

Yep, it’s because you’re in the same bucket as all that VPN’s other users. If there’s aggressive visitors through that VPN hitting any/many Cloudflare sites, that reCAPTCHA is going to kick in.

You can either:

  1. Stop using that VPN when visiting sites (Try Tor browser instead. I think Cloudflare has improved their Tor defense)
  2. Use Privacy Pass: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001992652-Privacy-Pass
3

Thank you for the quick reply.

Regards,

Nick Morter

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