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Steve3141's avatar
Steve3141
New Contributor

Denial of Service

When I try to connect to my Cox account under the VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA) I receive the following error: You have exceeded the maximum number of incorrect login attempts. Please attempt to recover your username or password and try again. Click here for more information. In addition, you are blocking the sending of SMTP email from PIA. When I disable PIA all my problems disappear. I have contacted PIA for help in this matter. As this problem recently showed up and I have not changed the PIA access program and the problem goes away when I am no longer connected via PIA I feel this is your issue. In short, it appears you have blacklisted PIA. At the risk of sounding paranoid I hope this is not an attempt to force our internet communications through Cox to not be encrypted. Yahoo, as I am sure you know, just confessed to scanning emails for the government. You are in a unique position as an ISP of being able to monitor and report on traffic across your network. As a consumer I have very few alternatives. As a strong advocate of privacy I find the recent issues to be somewhat disconcerting. Especially in view of the fact that you did not notify your consumer base of these changes. Although it probably won't do any good I intend to notify the FCC of this issue as well. I realize not much is secret any more on the internet but please allow us our illusions. Thank you.
encryption privacy surveillance government

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  • grymwulf's avatar
    grymwulf
    Contributor II

    VPN services like PIA (which I use) can be used for malicious attacks, and are often on blacklists because of this.  If you are truly concerned with security, I'd recommend not trying to access your account over PIA because that way there is a record of your VPN IP address associated with your real name.  Same with SMTP/IMAP access - don't access your ISP mail over the VPN, because again there is now a record associating your real name with the VPN IP address you are using.

  • Steve3141's avatar
    Steve3141
    New Contributor
    Thanks for the reply. I understand what you are saying. However, when I am not using PIA there is the possibility that there would exist a record associating my real name with my real IP address. I do vary my PIA address although I know that is not a "guarantee".
  • grymwulf's avatar
    grymwulf
    Contributor II

    Understood, but just like Netflix and other sites will block known VPN IP addresses due to *reasons* - when you use a shared IP address with other people, you will encounter issues just as you are complaining about.

    Heck when using PIA myself, there are a number of websites that either redirect me to cloudflare for DDOS detection, or have some sort of CAPTCHA to prove I'm not a robot.  This is an outgrowth of the shared nature of certain VPN providers, and unfortunately is a fact of life when using certain types of VPNs.  I'm sure Cox could probably come up with a better way of securing their website that also allows you to access your account, but I'm not surprised that the difficulty is there.