So I'm pretty much aware that this has nothing to do with this forum but I was hopping that maybe someone who knows more about this could see this thread and offer me some guidance.
For the past few weeks I've been having issues with some sites detecting my connection as a VPN or just blocking me from accessing at random times and I wasn't too sure of what the hell was going on, but tonight after GMG straight up told me it was blocking me when I tried to check their new bundle I decided to do a bit of googling about and found that one of the various sites that test an IP's reputation and whatnot claims that my IP address is a residential proxy, and after doing some searching about that I've seen some discussions of ISP's and/or routers getting compromised and now I'm a bit worried about this. I did a search on my wifi router to see if there were any mysterious device connected to it but it was just my PC and my family's phones, nothing weird, so at least it doesn't seem to be the case of a neighbor leeching my wifi, although I should probably do that test again during the day because doing this at midnight might not be exactly effective.
And if you want to know if I did anything stupid that might have compromised my IP I indeed remember doing such thing at some point about a month or two ago when I downloaded some random VPN app to my phone to claim a freebie from Fanatical that was blocked in my country, but I only used that app for like 5 minutes and then deleted it... which might very well have been more than enough time to fuck up my IP somehow.

I'd also appreciate any ideas of how to unfuck my IP if such thing is possible, otherwise I guess I'll just call my ISP tomorrow and try to get them to reshuffle things and assign me another IP but I know their customer service can be abysmal for anything more complicated than changing a password. I hope this ramble is coherent enough for someone to parse enough info from it to deduce my problem.

2 months ago

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Some ISPs are known to use CGNAT. Check with your provider to see if that’s the case. If it is, that would explain the issues you’re experiencing.

2 months ago
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More likely than not you have dynamic IP (each time your modem connects you to your ISP get a different IP) and someone who used that IP before ran a proxy (either intentionally or due to a compromised device) and that got the IP in lists such as DroneBL. That being the case, restarting your modem (killing power to it, waiting a few seconds, and restoring power) is generally enough to get you a new IP, which should hopefully fix your immediate problem. Getting the IP out of those lists is technically possible, but enough of a pain that it's not worth bothering with it for dynamic IP.

As AdJ mentioned, you may also be behind CGNAT, which is a situation where a bunch of machines are behind the same IP. That would make everything way more difficult, because then your IP is "dynamic" but tends to stay the same. If so, you'll probably have to complain at your ISP too. To know whether you're behind CGNAT, on Windows you can open a command prompt and type tracert google.com (on my Linux machine the terminal command is traceroute google.com); look in the first few lines that show up for an IP address in the 100.64.0.0 to 100.127.255.255 range. If you find one, you're behind CGNAT and all I can say is good luck; if not, you're probably (not definitely!) good.

2 months ago
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I'm using Linux on this PC but after looking up how to do it I pulled what I think is the right output, in line 2 I get this: "2 100.86.224.2 (100.86.224.2) 5.891 ms 5.985 ms 6.068 ms", I suspect that is the one that you say might be in the range, so it might mean that I am indeed on a CGNAT.
Not gonna lie I've been reading about this whole CGNAT thing and it definitely is going over my head. I did try turning the modem off as that's what I usually did with my old ISP whenever I had any IP related problem but I think this one either isn't dynamic or not dynamic enough because it doesn't solve anything.

2 months ago
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Yeah, that's CGNAT alright. My condolences. Now that I think about it, it's even possible that your IP is being seen as a residential proxy precisely because of CGNAT, because it kind of is one in a way (but you have no control over it, so it's pretty unfair on you). I can't say how lucky you'll be in trying to get out; it depends a lot on stuff like your ISP's policies, the terms of your contract, the applicable laws, and so on.

I'm gonna try and explain how CGNAT works in a relatively simple way; it's a bit long, but bear with me. IP version 4 addresses (the ones in the A.B.C.D format, where each letter is a number from 0 to 255) have run out (a long time ago, in fact), and we have far too many devices connected to the internet, so we need tricks to have more devices hooked up than the amount of IPs. NAT (Network Address Translation) is one such trick. Every device on my local network (e.g. my phone, my laptop, my desktop) is behind a NAT; that makes them share the same external IP, so to the internet as a whole they're one machine, and the router does some magic that allows them to talk to the internet and listen back. But if an outside machine tries to talk to them first (as in, start a conversation with my machines, rather than answer when spoken to), my router has no idea what do with that message (what machine should take it?) and just throws it away, which is the big downside. CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT) took that idea and applied it for an entire ISP (a "carrier", thus the name), or for a chunk of its users. So you have any number of homes and businesses on the same external IP. If every home has three machines and you have 100 homes behind a single IP on CGNAT, that's 300 machines. All behind the same IP. So it's little wonder that CGNAT looks to the world like a proxy (consider: a proxy is basically something that allows its users, said to be "behind" it, to connect to other machines as if the proxy's IP was their own; that IP, known as the endpoint, hides their real one: you connect from A to proxy and the proxy connects to B, but B only sees the proxy, which forwards the answers to A). Normally, if you don't need to be connectable (a typical use case of requiring that is having security cameras you need to access from the outside), CGNAT isn't a bother, but then you get the situation you're currently facing and all goes to hell. I'm not sure this explains a lot, or particularly well, but I hope it at least helps you see the general picture.

By the way, the long-term solution to this is called IP version 6, but we've been 20 years away from having IPv6 replace IPv4 for the last 20 years, and I think we'll still be 20 years away from it 20 years from now. It's going slower than I could hope to tell you.

2 months ago
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That is a much more concise explanation that all of poorly redacted stuff I was seeing, articles these days are awfully written, so thanks for explaining this mess to me. I was aware that IPv4 had run out years ago and that they were pulling various tricks to extend it but I had no clue that they were literally throwing hundreds of homes behind a single IP, that sucks.
On the positive side I found one discussion where people were talking about managing to convince this ISP of undoing CGNAT for them after trying calling customer support multiple times, but results appear to vary depending on region (the company is Claro, one of the largest in Latin America), so there might be some hope of unscrewing my connection XD

2 months ago
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Well I'm glad I managed to make it make sense! :) And yeah, IPv4 these days is hacks atop hacks atop even more hacks; the landscape is pretty awful and it's only gonna get worse with IoT, 5G, and other newer tech that implies even more devices.

I'm not sure about Argentina, but I know Brazil has some success stories with Claro and CGNAT, so I think it's worth a shot.

2 months ago
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That’s unfortunate, but your ISP may be able to provide a dedicated static public IPv4 address. In some cases this is free, though more often it comes with an additional fee. A static IP bypasses the limitations of CGNAT and gives you a direct, consistent connection, which usually resolves these kinds of issues. Keep in mind, though, that not every ISP offers static IPv4 anymore. Some may instead suggest IPv6, which is the future-proof solution, but not all services fully support it yet.

2 months ago
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Yep, been reading about the woes of other users that run into this kind of problems, and some appear to have been successful. From what I've seen one was suggesting that mentioning "opening ports for a camera" did the trick but I don't know if I feel like lying because I'm not that great at making shit up in these situations. I'll just try my luck and see what happens, for now I'm using my phone over 4G to access the sites that refuse to load otherwise, which thankfully aren't that many so far.

2 months ago
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Closed 1 month ago by Axelflox.