Website owner says UCEPROTECT blacklist blocks innocent IPs and charges for removal
A website owner says their site was blocked by Orange over a UCEPROTECT Level 3 listing covering all of DigitalOcean's network, with removal offered for about $30 a month.
The account was posted on Hacker News on Oct. 5, 2026, under the heading "Tell HN: Uceprotect is extorting website owners." The user wrote that they discovered by accident that their website was being blocked by Orange's security filters.
A check showed their IP address on UCEPROTECT Level 3, a listing the user said is based on the reputation of the whole autonomous system ASN 14061, which belongs to DigitalOcean in the United States. In that arrangement, an address is listed regardless of its own traffic history, the post said, so an IP that did nothing wrong still ends up on the list because of the network it belongs to.
For sites in that position, the user wrote, UCEPROTECT offers whitelisting for roughly $30 per month or $108 per year. The post links to the company's RBL lookup page for ASN 14061 and to whitelisted.org.
The user said they then checked the ASNs of several other popular hosting providers and found them listed as well. From that, the poster concluded that sites hosted on DigitalOcean or other major providers are likely blacklisted too.
The practical effect described in the post is loss of mobile customers. Orange's "cybersecurity protection" screens traffic using blacklists such as UCEPROTECT, the user wrote, so a listing can separate a site from people browsing on Orange's mobile network.
"Honestly, in my 20-year career, this is the first time I've seen a blacklist misbehave this badly and ask for money when there's clearly been no wrongdoing," the user wrote.
The submission is a single first-hand account. The claims it makes, including the network-wide basis of the Level 3 listing, the whitelisting prices and Orange's use of such blacklists for traffic filtering, were not independently confirmed in the post. No statement from UCEPROTECT or Orange appeared in the thread, which was recorded with four points and no comments.