I have a fosstodon account which I don't often use, but today I logged in on the offchance of finding something interesting (I didn't). Immediately I got an email from them saying that someone had logged in in my name with such-and-such an ip address (which was new apparently), and if it wasn't me, I should change my password, etc.etc.

It obviously was me from the timing. But the address they gave was different from the one that I get from the usual show-my-ip-address search. So I fed it into an ip address lookup site and it actually belongs to Cloudflare.Those people seem to be getting into everything nowadays.

Can someone please explain this?

Good evening

As I see it, Cloudflare must be part of the site's own script-jungle. If I am right, they are sending out these warnings a lot. In any case, you should check with the site-administrator – I do not know what fosstodon is.

If your device is behind of a NAT device, the outside doesn't show your IP address, show the IP address of NAT device.

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We can't answer this. But your ISP's support can.

Either a Proxy or VPN would have a different source IP. A proxy should have a header to identify the probable source ip, but most detectors might not trust or decode it. A VPN would just look like it came from the VPN endpoint.

I ignore such "warnings."

Yeah, I'm going to ignore it. Incidently, the internet-facing address I usually get when I search for it is registered to my isp. So obviously clownflare is acting as some kind of man-in-the-middle between them and the fosstodon site. And this is apparently recent. They are getting their claws into everything.

But who invites them? They are not hacking into systems and do no blackmailing.

Do you happen to use VPN?

No. I think I have access to VPN software through Protonmail but I don't know how to set one up.

So I read that fosstodon was behind cloudflare, then not, then again about 70 days ago because of a DDOS attack.

https://fosstodon.org/@kev/109953654645367614

So when using a load balancer, that is a case where it changes the source ip. Most LBs will detect and add a forwarding header, but if the script uses the network ip and not the header "apparent" ip, it will flag it.

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