[ebbp]

As someone on the “buy side” of Cloudflare-like services, that’s not how it works. How could a third party like Cloudflare protect my unprotected IP address? A very basic part of using a CDN/DDOS protection product is not allowing raw traffic to your origin server.

RE “as long as no one leaked their IP” - the IPv4 space is quite small. It’s trivial to scan it and discuss unadvertised, but ultimately very public, servers.

If customers don’t already have an understanding of both of these points, then they need to increase their competence in areas that are, frankly, pretty basic.

[5ESS]

> How could a third party like Cloudflare protect my unprotected IP address?

Simple, they could scan the internet like I explained and notify their customers who’s site IP is findable this way with a big scary warning message. They could do this easily and cheaply, but for some reason they don’t.

[ebbp]

Well they wouldn’t need to do that, because you’re already pointing them at your IP, right?

Cloudflare are providing the service they say they are, it’s the customer’s fault if they don’t understand basic best practice.