Oh! The trials and tribulations…
Can you imagine my surprise when I was denied access to this site this morning?
The error message I received from Firefox and Chrome were similar and made it sound like I might have been hacked. “Lithuania”, “geoblocking”, “security certificate invalid”, and all kinds of unsmiley indications (including a spam contact message overnight).
The AI assistant on my hosting service said everything was ok. A human said everything was okay. No one could figure it out. Until I tried something locally.
I am at the office today, you see. So I disconnected from the “guest network” at the office, did a mobile hotlink and tried again. Everything was as expected. Apparently, the firewall they use here is geoblocking certain servers. I’m guessing this site is located in Lithuania (at least for today, I believe it is mirrored in several places, including in the US). That makes sense, as it prevents access by hackers — argue with me if you want, but that larger region has a reputation for having hackers. Even though I have a valid SSL certificate, I’m guessing the firewall software is set to high discrimination (we’ve been ransomwared previously).
So, no, nothing is wrong with the site. Something is wrong with the overly aggressive firewall that is not even connected to our primary network (I assume my site is still too new to meet reputation rankings requirements).
I’m sharing this with you to remind myself not to jump to conclusions because of coinciding “weird” behavior, but to ask myself “what is different?” before I get support involved, assuming the worst.
I’ll go on and actually work now…
Leave a comment. Markdown use is permitted.