{"id":145486,"date":"2022-10-20T13:53:03","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T11:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=145486"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:26:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:26:28","slug":"website-student-party-liberi-erasmi-blocked-on-eur-network-for-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2022\/10\/20\/website-student-party-liberi-erasmi-blocked-on-eur-network-for-a-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Website student party Liberi Erasmi blocked on EUR network for a month"},"content":{"rendered":"

The website of student party Liberi Erasmi was blocked on the university’s network for a month. Visitors to the site were notified that it was a ‘malicious’ site. The ombudsperson is launching an investigation into the incident at Liberi’s request.<\/p>\n

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For a month, the site liberierasmi.nl<\/a> couldn\u2019t be visited via the EUR wifi network or on desktop PCs on campus. The firewall used by EUR, FortiGuard<\/a>, reported since 30 August that liberierasmi.nl was \u2018malicious\u2019 and that the site is \u2018in violation of your Internet usage policy\u2019. Ignoring the warning and clicking through anyway was impossible. Outside the university, the website was accessible as normal. After the IT department submitted a reassessment request to FortiGuard in early October, the warning disappeared.<\/p>\n

According to Nawin Ramcharan, University Council member for Liberi Erasmi, there was no reason to flag the site as malicious. The company that developed the Liberi website did all kinds of scans and found no malware or certificate issues. They also found out that the website is categorised as \u2018malicious\u2019 on only two of 88 well known firewalls (FortiGuard and McAfee). \u201cIn our view, this implies that there couldn\u2019t have been an automatic categorisation,\u201d Ramcharan says. He therefore suspects that someone manually reported the party\u2019s website to FortiGuard, after which the firewall blocked the site without verification.<\/p>\n

Feeling unsafe<\/h2>

Ramcharan says he feels unsafe because of the incident. \u201cThe blocking started on 30 August, precisely during an introductory week with members of the University Council and university policy staff. Many attendees hardly knew about Liberi Erasmi before that. And the anonymous reporter must have known exactly how this works, and what firewall the university uses.\u201d For these reasons, Ramcharan considers it likely that the possible culprit was present at the introduction week, but also doesn\u2019t rule out the possibility that someone else was behind it. Whether the website was actually blocked after a user report from someone who was present at that acquaintance weekend, EM has not been able to discover.<\/p>\n

However, it does appear to be easy to report a website as malicious<\/em>. This can be done via a FortiGuard web form. EM took a test and reported a website to FortiGuard as malicious (the owner of the website was informed and agreed to the experiment). It was just a single report, with a fake name and an obviously fake and non-existent e-mail address. Within 24 hours, the website was completely blocked by the firewall. Those who visited the website received exactly the same message as with Liberi: \u2018malicious\u2019 and \u2018in violation of your internet policy\u2019.<\/p>\n

'Impossible for most sites'<\/h2>

Blocking after one simple notification is impossible for most sites, says Rory O\u2019Connor, chief information security officer at EUR. \u201cThis can only be done to sites that have not been assessed before and have low traffic.\u201d Other sites are only blocked for security reasons, O\u2019Connor says. He assumes that was the cause of the block on Liberi Erasmi\u2019s site. \u201cWe asked FortiGuard why Liberi was blocked, and the answer was that it was done by the company\u2019s automated rating engine. Not manually, in other words.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that Liberi is flagged as malicious by only two of 88 firewalls, is because the site was probably mostly visited from campus, O\u2019Connor suspects. On campus, FortiGuard is triggered, and other firewalls probably not.<\/p>\n

Which issues FortiGuard detected, he doesn\u2019t know. It is also unknown whether the firewall doesn\u2019t give the exact same response when blocked after a manual report. The company doesn\u2019t give Liberi Erasmi, O\u2019Connor or EM any information about this, even after repeated requests. A security scan by O\u2019Connor does show that the student party\u2019s site scores relatively low on security measures, but malware has not been detected so far.<\/p>\n

Only after two weeks did Ramcharan discover that his party\u2019s website had been blocked. When EUR\u2019s IT department requested a reassessment from FortiGuard at his request in late September, the website was approved again. \u201cIt is unfortunate that the site was blocked, fortunately this has since been rectified,\u201d a spokesperson for the university said about it. Why the alleged malware is now no longer a problem to FortiGuard is unclear. According to Liberi\u2019s site administrator, literally nothing has changed on the website in the meantime. Ramcharan has asked ombudsperson Mario Buijk to investigate, and he has agreed to do so. It is unclear how long this investigation will take.<\/p>\n

Liberi Erasmi was formed this year and has three seats in the University Council.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t

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