Yes, @Townman I completely agree. I'd similarly dismissed the ipqualityscore.com result as scare-mongering, given that half the results only show as "sign up to see more".
I'm similarly conscious of why my IP Address may have become blocked, which is why I've been trying to find out (so far unsuccessfully) from Akamai, Tesco etc.
My working assumption is that Tui are responsible for adding me. For a few months I've been monitoring the price of a couple of flights, waiting for a price drop before buying. The usual way to obtain prices is to submit a form with route, dates, passengers etc to obtain the prices. However, the results page URL contains all those details as parameters, so "bookmark" those URLs and the prices can be obtained directly. I did this for both flights, and had these auto-open in my browser on start-up (which starts at least once per day). For a while, instead of displaying the results immediately, it's shown something like a "Challenge Validation" / "Holding" page that counts down from 10sec to zero, before the results are then shown. I suspect that's coming from some anti-scraping protection (or similar) on the website. Recently, that's started behaving oddly, e.g. the count reverting back to 10 before getting to zero a few times, or it just stopping and requires reloading. I wouldn't be surprised if not going through the form (and maybe picking up some new session ID / cookie etc?), combined with multiple re-loads, maybe more than once per day, has breached some "web-scraper!!" alarm threshold, which has then been fed back from Tui to Akamai as part of the protection package Akamai provides? Of course, this is all obvious with hindsight, after the wider Akamai block started. Clearly, when I get the new IP Address sorted, I'll stop doing this!!
I'm reasonably confident there isn't anything odd going on within my network. I have a variety of monitoring software running that (I assume...) will alert me to something odd happening. I continually see failed login attempts on the open (non-default!) ssh port, (mostly from Chinese or Russian IP Address ranges...) which is locked down to a single username and secured with a public-private key, rather than a password anyway. Successful non-local logins are specifically flagged up and I see these when I login remotely when out and about. This hasn't been triggered by anyone else.... (yet....?)
Anyway, I'm pinning my hopes on a new static IP address. If I stop doing the Tui thing, hopefully it will all be ok. If the new address gets blocked too, then i'll spend time going in search of what's going on in the network and make more effort with uncovering the root cause of the block.
It's like a circuit-breaker unexpectedly popping - you reset it once only; if it pops again, you go in search of the fault, if it doesn't - sorted, get on with life 🙂
