Banned by Akamai (or some websites hosted with Akamai)

Wed Mar 27 21:43:58 UTC 2019

I think it's a general problem with a lot of these application firewall
companies these days.

There's been a long time I couldn't access both staples.com and
officedepot.com, and officedepot.com is still broken for me to this day.
(Ironically, they're both using the same CDN — so much for the competition
and differentiation.)

I'm obviously a valid user, just as many others who get access denied, but
I'm pretty sure that all of these access attempts by customers who are
misclassified as bots and denied access are subsequently aggregated by
these CDNs back to their clients as bad bots, which — luckily! — have been
blocked to prevent $badThings from happening,
$giveUsMoreMoneyToProtectYouFromYourOwnCustomers.

Talking with these vendors at their booths at trade shows reveals that the
incentives and selling points in the application firewall business are just
wrong — they each boast about blocking more "bots" than their competition,
completely dismissing the fact that many of these "bots" are actual paying
customers that get denied access.

Cheers,
Constantine.

P.S. Below is the page I currently get when visiting officedepot.com — so
much for taking care of business!

>>>>
>>>>OfficeDepot.com - Taking Care Of Business. Office Supplies, Furniture,
Technology & More!
>>>>We're Sorry. We are unable to process your last request.
>>>>
>>>>Rest assured we are working diligently to resolve this issue. If you
would like to place an order by phone or speak with one of our Customer
Service representatives please contact us:
>>>>
>>>>Call 1-800-GO-DEPOT
>>>>Reference Number: 18.34b51002.1553708764.397327
>>>>
>>>>Copyright © 2012 by Office Depot, Inc. All rights reserved.

On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 at 10:57, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

> Akamai will _NOT_ be helpful in this situation.
>
> They will tell you that it is their customers who set the policy for their
> “Web Application Firewall”.
>
> In reality, Akamai’s customers set certain things on “autopilot” where
> Akamai maintains a reputation database for various IP addresses and
> triggers actions
> set by their customers without their customers direct knowledge or
> intervention.
>
> Akamai’s process for dealing with this (or rather their refusal to create
> a process for dealing with it) is a horrible disservice to the internet and
> to their customers.
>
> I tried to push for changes to this process while I was there and had no
> significant success.
>
> I’ve also been the victim of these practices after I was laid off by
> Akamai (along with about 7% of their employees last year).
>
> Because of a variety of issues I’m not at liberty to elaborate, it isn’t
> an easy problem for Akamai to solve, but as a company that prides itself on
> tackling and solving difficult problems, they’ve certainly fallen short
> here.
>
> Owen
>
>
> > On Mar 27, 2019, at 08:46 , Siyuan Miao <aveline at misaka.io> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I got some complaints from customers and found out that all IP addresses
> announced in one of our ASN are banned by Akamai or some websites hosted
> with Akamai.
> >
> > I've tried to contact one of the website owners but didn't get any
> response.
> >
> > Could someone from Akamai contact me off-list?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Siyuan Miao
>
>
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