Help! our business website is being blocked by EE's security/threat detection

[RichardTunn]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I look after the infrastructure for Team RH Fitness. Since 15 July, our main website has been blocked by EE's network security/threat detection, with a message saying it may host malicious activity. As far as I can tell this is the security/threat block in the EE app rather than Content Lock.

The difficulty is that our members on EE currently can't reach our website or our app, so I'm keen to get it reviewed.

I've checked both our website and the domain our app relies on against the main independent security sources, and they all report them as clean, which makes me think this is a false positive:

- Cisco Talos: reputation Neutral, not on their block list, categorised Sports and Recreation.
- VirusTotal: zero detections across more than 90 security vendors, including Google Safe Browsing.
- Google Safe Browsing: no classification.
- SSL Labs: A rating with a valid certificate.

Because every recognised source shows the domains as clean, it looks like an automated classification issue on the network's side rather than anything actually found on the site. If possible, it would really help if the domain and its subdomains could have the security flag corrected and be allowlisted.

I've already emailed the safeguard team on 15 July with a screenshot and this evidence, but I haven't had a reply yet, so I wanted to ask here too.

Would a Community Manager be able to help escalate this to the categorisation/security team for a review and let me know a reference I can track it against? I'm very happy to share the exact domain, the screenshot, and any other detail privately or whenever it's useful.

I also wanted to gently flag the wider impact, in case it's useful feedback.

When a legitimate business is blocked like this, the effect is significant: members are turned away, sales are lost, and the business is labelled as a threat to its own users, which really damages trust.

In our case we only found out because a member told us, as there doesn't seem to be any notification to the site owner or an easy way to check. It would help businesses a lot if the process notified owners when their domain is blocked, checked against the main public reputation sources before applying a block, and offered a quicker route to appeal.

I completely understand the need to protect customers from genuine threats, so this is meant as constructive feedback rather than a complaint.

Thanks very much for your help.

[Northerner]

Hi @RichardTunn 

What is the domain name. 

Is this site only blocked on strict settings.

Thanks 

[RichardTunn]

Hi @Northerner 

the domain is teamrhfitness.com

We only have 1 screen grab to go off sent to us from a member, nobody in the tech department at our company has EE as a broadband provider unfortunately.

[Katie_J]

Hi @RichardTunn. 

Thanks for coming here, I would love to see if I can help with this.

How many reports are you seeing?

I've just tested visiting the website on my personal EE phone and can access this OK. 

Are you aware if those trying to access the website have content lock fully removed on their EE account?

In the meantime I will flag this with our security team. 

Katie

[RichardTunn]

Hi  @Katie_J 

We've had around 50 reports of this so far come through.

It seems to only affect members trying to reach the site or use our app when on EE broadband, mobile networks look to be unaffected (but the ones we had test this had a different mobile provider to EE)

They have all been able to get around the issue by switching to mobile data.

Unfortunately I don't have any more information on their individual settings for content lock.

for some additional information, a member had said this

then

So i'm not sure if someone has already addressed this from EE anyway, when we run an SSL server chain test we get A across each result.
The only thing that I can see is the fact shopify is in the chain for the hosted website so contains a mismatch there but that is intended behaviour by them.

many thanks,

Richard

[Katie_J]

Thanks so much this is helpful @RichardTunn. 

I have also tested using EE Broadband and can access the website OK. 

This has now been flagged with the relevant team and soon as I have a response I will let you know. 

Katie 🙂

[Schockwave]

I have just tried it on EE broadband and managed to get the webpage up with cyber security and without cyber security, so with VPN and without VPN..

[Austel]

I have just posted an issue trying to log onto my energy firm whilst using Broadband. I get the same block issues as your customers, yet using mobile data I get full access. I was able to log in a few days ago, the problem is very recent. Any success bypassing router security?

thanks. 

[RichardTunn]

Hi @Austel 

I believe the team have taken actions to sort our site classification out.

It appears that on the 15th of July the third party that EE/BT/Sky use to classify business domains for their security hub rulesets may have scraped some sites and mistakenly reclassified them due to keywords that appear on web pages.

This is the only conclusion that I can come to with the outcome and replies I have also had directly from BT.

I assume the third party may have used some sort of AI tooling to scrape sites, whilst this is a great thing to keep users safe these edge cases are often not considered in rollout of these things.

Looking at other posts and forums it seems to be quite widespread.

Hopefully with your post they will be able to apply the same fix to the site for your energy supplier and also feedback the volume of cases to the third party that provides the site classifications with it having a negative effect on so many of their users.