Website unjabbed.net is blocked by Cisco

[unjabbed-net]

Unjabbed.net is a small social media type website. It not does contain any mature images. It should not be blocked. Other websites in the same category / type are not blocked.

I have attached an image showing the block.

Please can you unblock this website. It is preventing people accessing the site, even when they are just on their mobile phones and not through any corporate network.

[Dustin Anderson · Accepted solution]

If you are using OpenDNS you can put in exceptions. It is listed by your screenshot as being blocked as a dating site and that is a category your company has blocked. Whoever managed your settings would have to add an exception.

[unjabbed-net]

The message I got said the block was when an iPhone using roaming tried to access the site.

[unjabbed-net]

As far as I know this was not on a corporate network.

[Dustin Anderson]

OpenDNS is a paid service and whoever subscribes sets what is and is not allowed. It may be a corporate device that is then set to be covered by it. We use it at our company and even our guest network is covered by it as we set OpenDNS as the DNS servers on the network. 

OpenDNS has 2 IPs used for lookups and would be set up on the device to get blocked. It is the only way to get the block off a corporate network.

https://www.opendns.com/setupguide/ 

[unjabbed-net]

Thanks for your replies.

[Dustin Anderson]

I guess there is a home free version, so the user may have signed up for use and would have to add the exception, but not sure how customizable the free version is.

https://signup.opendns.com/homefree/ 

[unjabbed-net · Accepted solution]

It really seems over-the-top to block a website just because it is classified as "dating". People will use this site to arrange meetings and blocking the site on public Wifi at train stations etc will cause problems, unless they have exchanged other forms of contact information first. It seems to me OpenDNS will be using sources of data of which sites to block compiled by other companies.

Inspection of the website seems to suggest it is more a general purpose social media site.

Cisco should remove unjabbed.net from the list of blocked sites. Blocking websites is a form of censorship and should be reserved for really extreme sites, not innocous ones.

Cisco is company registered in the USA where there is the First Amendment for Free Speech. I know this is meant to control Congress, but still the USA should be against censorshop.

Again this website is an innocous one in the realm of social media. It is not extreme in any way. There is no way this should have been blocked in the first place. Cisco should actually do something to remove this block and make it does happen again.

[unjabbed-net]

Additionally I was told this website was not just blocked, but a scary warning came up saying the website was unsafe. The website in question is an innocous one, with no malware on it or extreme talk. There should be checks and balances before one organisation says bad things about another organisation. This block should be removed. It seems likely this website was put in a list of bad websites from a third party source. This third party source should be contacted, whoever there are, to remove it.

[ekramer]

As reported from https://www.virustotal.com, your website contains the following metadata:

description
Unvaccinated dating & friendship for covid unvaxxed unjabbed adult singles, men and women. 
keywords
unvaccinated, unvaxxed, unjabbed, dating, dating, app, singles, adult, men, women, covid, vaccine, free

Your path to unblocking this is through your network administrator, not on this forum.

[unjabbed-net]

Thanks for the link to virustotal.com . It was useful and helpful in trying to get a categorisation changed. Posting here did help though as I didn't know about virustotal.com which has hints on where incorrect categorisations originate from.

Anyway the website was not just blocked, a warning message came up saying it was unsafe and worse. This message was totally inappropriate whether the website is categorised as dating or social media or whatever.

So OpenDNS should look into changing their warning messages and make them less scary.

[Dustin Anderson]

By your image, it does not say the site is unsafe, just that is blocked due to content filtering by your network administrator. It also lists the blocked category of dating. This just comes down to whoever hosts the network choosing to block that category. 

[unjabbed-net]

I am aware the image does not say the website is unsafe, but the person who sent us the screenshot told us in her email she got a message saying the website was unsafe and far worse. Plus the day before one man contacted us saying our website was blocked with an unsafe message.

Thank you for all the people who have replied to my original post. I was only vaguely aware of website filtering before and never thought an innocous website as our one would be blocked. The replies here has given me clues on where to go to get our website recategorised. I have looked around and some organisations list it as adult, dating, unsafe or not family friendly. Obviously three out of four of those ratings are completely inaccurate. At least because of the post I made here and elsewhere have told me where I can go to submit corrections.

If you do Internet searches for "website blocked" you will see many posts expressing extreme frustration at innocous websites being blocked. This is not something trivial at all.

One such post is here https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/neustar.com 

[adamwin]

Re-stating what has been said above - Cisco does not block sites for content reasons -- The only default blocking in our product is for malware or phishing. Customers of Cisco Umbrella (like network admins) use Umbrella to implement their own security and acceptable-use policies. In this case, Dating was a category that was blocked by the Umbrella customer-admin.

Umbrella does not use any 'scary' messaging in the default block or warning pages. It is possible that an Umbrella customer used their own customized messaging. It is also possible (but cannot confirm without a screenshot) that it was another security product that showed the scary messaging to the user. 

To request a change in Cisco categorization, please go through https://www.talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?search=unjabbed.net