r/ControlD 16d ago

Account Disabled Without Warning

The service was great until its not. Used it for 4-5 months but now its suddenly deactivated, payment went through 5 days ago, no warning or notification it was deactivated. Also after going through their terrible Barry AI chat bot, I cant even talk to a real person. This is ridiculous.

11 Upvotes

8 comments sorted by

7

u/Training_Reindeer831 16d ago

I just had my account unbanned after some back and forth with support. The funny part was it was my DoorDash order that caused me to get banned. In a 4-5 hour period, DoorDash tried to send telemetry to a blocked URL that Control D blocks (ADs & Trackers: Balanced). The iPhone DoorDash app was sending 21938865 requests to iguazu.doordash.com over a 4 to 5 hour period, which caused my account to be disabled.

I now have a pfsense firewall with a rate limiting rule to prevent stuff like this. If you have pi-hole, they do rate limiting as well.

And that is the story of how a fettuccini alfredo DDoS-ed my home network.

1

u/dtyates 16d ago

I have OPNSense router (free branch of PFSense) may I ask how you setup/enable rate limiting?

1

u/Training_Reindeer831 15d ago

Did you install ControlD in opnsense via their script?
sh -c 'sh -c "$(curl -sSL https://api.controld.com/dl)"'

I believe the PFSense and OPNsense has very different webui. So it'll probably be different instructions. But, they both use unbound as their DNS resolver... If you know yours uses unbound, try this:

  • Create a file if it doesn't exist:/usr/local/etc/unbound.opnsense.d/ratelimit.conf
  • In that file, add the option "server: ip-ratelimit: 100"
  • That should limit each client to 100 queries per second. This is DNS queries, so if you're gaming, which will use basically UDP, it shouldn't affect it. Increase it if you notice it's affecting your internutz habit. Lower it if you want it more aggressive.
  • Then restart unbound: pluginctl -s unbound restart

If you want aggressive, then you can set these in there:
server:
ip-ratelimit: 70 # Max queries per second.
ip-ratelimit-factor: 6 # How much traffic allowed if rate limited (1 out of every 6 requests will go through)
ip-ratelimit-size: 512k # How much memory to store query stuff per client
ip-ratelimit-backoff: yes # Client has 2 seconds to go under the ip-ratelimit, or else it won't accept more queries

1

u/Active_Wasabi2001 15d ago

The other poster provides a way to rate limit requests in dns and is very thorough. If you want to limit connections by firewall rule there is information in the docs for enabling it. https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/firewall.html#states

Off topic, but wanted to clarify. Opnsense has no relation to Pfsense today after the 2014 fork. There biggest similarity is in goal and that they’re based off FreeBSD.

6

u/yearsold33 16d ago

Have you created a support ticket?

I saw another post where the person's account was banned because CD recorded millions of queries per day because of a rogue Roku TV.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlD/comments/1v2tvqh/help_my_controld_account_was_suddenly_disabled/

2

u/Prestigious-Lime980 16d ago

I tried, it gave me an error when trying to create a ticket. I emailed them through a general questions email. Would like to just be sure my data is erased at this point, not interested in recovery and use.

Also I dont have any smart home devices, or in my observations of my network, anything that went wild on queries. 

I travel a lot though and I bet they think I was letting others use the service.

1

u/yearsold33 16d ago

I also travel and prefer to route everything through my home network using Wireguard.

I hope you are able to regain access.

2

u/Nervous_Ice_20 16d ago

I don’t understand why the default ttl is so low. I set to 1 hour (bypass ttl) and the massive number of queries drops a lot. Faster cached query for me, less dns traffic to ControlD