I discovered today that this blog is not reachable via the campus network at Maynooth University. I wasn’t actually trying to write a post, which I sometimes do at lunchtimes or after work, but simply to send a link to this blog post to a colleague in the Department. I found I couldn’t make a connection to the blog, getting the dreaded ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT when I tried to do so. I thought it was strange as no other websites were affected and I had no problem connecting to this site from home.
In order to find out what was going on I raised a ticket with Maynooth University IT Services reporting the issues. I quickly got a response saying explaining that this was not the first time they had seen this issue with this particular hosting service (i.e. wordpress.com). It went on:
We were subjected to a phishing campaign originating from a site that shares your hosting address and those addresses are now denied by our firewall policy.
As the phishing origin server is still extant we cannot safely whitelist this IP …without risk of exposing our network to a repeat attack.
Blocking the entire wordpress.com domain because one of its sites was used in a phishing attack seems like overkill to me, but at least the explanation wasn’t what I had feared: that the University Management decided to block the blog on campus because I have been critical of its policies!
In the past have sent students links to various educational blog posts from time to time. It looks like I’ll have to stop doing that as they’re not going to be readable on campus unless the firewall policy changes.
