You may have heard of the term “whaling’ and you’re probably thinking, ‘ What is that? And why would I need to bypass Cloudflare when working with my website? ’ Whaling is a term used in the online world to describe a process where an attacker tries to detect whether their computer has been protected with a firewall. If they detect that a device has blocked access to their site, they will try to figure out how to bypass that protection. In other words, whalers are trying every trick in the book to be able to visit your website so you should also try every trick in the book as well. The reason? It might work.
If you have sensitive data on your website or if you want to restrict access for visitors from specific countries, then Cloudflare is not for you. However, if you don’t have sensitive data or if you don’t care about restricting users from certain countries, then it might end up being beneficial for you. We show 5 ways on how you can bypass Cloudflare when necessary.
Set Your Custom Domain Name
If you’re using a custom domain name, set it up with your own email address. This will protect you from whalers trying to bypass Cloudflare and gain access to your site.
This is the simplest way to bypass Cloudflare on your website. For example, if the domain name of your website is www.mysite.com, then set up an email account called [email protected] and send all emails for that account from that email address only. Now whalers will have a difficult time gaining access to any of your emails or information because they won’t be able to guess at your username/email or password combinations.
Another way you can bypass Cloudflare is by increasing the length of the timeout period before visitors are allowed into your website after they’ve been blocked. Make sure there’s a long timeout period before visitors are allowed in so that they aren’t so easily able to bypass Cloudflare again after a certain amount of time has passed.
You can also use 3rd party caching software to prevent getting blocked by whalers when accessing the site via their browser (e.g., Microsoft Edge). This will help prevent them from being able to visit your website without being detected as well as giving you more control over who is visiting your website through shared IP addresses (this method is not recommended for many websites).
Use a Self-signed Certificate
The first and easiest way to bypass Cloudflare is to use a self-signed certificate. This will allow you to visit your website without having to worry about the users being blocked from your site. However, this is not ideal because it doesn’t provide any security benefits.
Another option is to use a certificate that has been signed by a trusted third party such as Symantec or Thawte. These certificates are more secure because they are verified by a trusted party and they don’t carry any risk of impersonation.
An additional option is to use an SSL certificate provided by VeriSign with an Extended Validation (EV) status. These certificates provide the highest level of security and they are only issued when a business has proven their identity with one of the Certificate Authority (CA) providers such as Equifax, Thawte, GeoTrust or RapidSSL. Cloudflare uses VeriSign for their EV certificates so you can rely on them if you’re going this route.
Block Cloudflare on Specific IPs
Sometimes you’ll need to block access to your website from specific countries. For example, if you have a business that sells products that are banned in certain countries, then you might want to restrict access to your website from those countries. To block only one IP address, use a firewall like uBlock Origin or Cloudflare canary as they will allow you to select a specific IP address and block it.
Use Tor
As we mentioned before, Cloudflare is not for you if you have sensitive data on your website or want to restrict access based on a user’s country. However, Tor can be used to bypass the restrictions set by Cloudflare and still provide your users with a safe experience. This can be done by using a service called Tor Project’s Hidden Services.
Tor is an internet anonymity service that helps users protect their identity and location from being compromised online. Tor has the ability to make it so that the most advanced methods of whaling cannot detect whether or not someone is using Tor at any given time.
Install a VPN
We recommend using a virtual private network (VPN) on your computer in order to bypass Cloudflare. VPNs are typically used for securing all of your internet traffic, but can also be used for bypassing geographical restrictions set by Cloudflare. In this case, you just need to connect the VPN on your computer and then get back to the normal browsing process. So if you have a website that is geo-restricted and you want to access it from anywhere, then you should consider installing a VPN.
Other Options
If you need to bypass Cloudflare, there are other options. You can use a VPN, DNS or SSL-TLS proxy. A VPN and DNS proxy will allow you to visit your site just as if you were in any other country and the SSL-TLS proxy will encrypt your data so that no one can see it when they visit your website. The downside is that these types of proxies are not free if you pay for them monthly.