Why is My Proxy Blocked?

We’ve all been there – you’re stuck in work or school, and frankly bored out of your brain.   Sure you have internet access, but all the most interesting sites are blocked –

• Facebook Blocked
• Youtube Blocked
• MySpace Blocked
• World of Warcraft (games and forum) Blocked

So, why’s it happening and what can you do about it?

Your company or school controls your access to the internet at several points and is blocking your access at several levels.

The first control is probably through their own proxy server.  If you go and look in Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN Settings or something like that in different browsers, you’ll probably see a proxy server set.  That address will be a server controlled by your company where they force all internet traffic.  If they’ve done a decent job, you won’t be able to change this.

The settings will normally be deployed by something called GPO (group Policy Objects) which are the way most organisations control what their computer looks like.  These apply settings like specific desktops, screensavers, Internet Explorer settings each time you boot up your computer.

Therefore, absolutely everything you request goes through the company proxy server.  You might think you’re being clever searching for ninja proxy sites on the internet but I’m afraid you’re not.  All you are doing is creating a log of you searching for ‘ninja proxy sites online’, and letting administrators know you want to bypass their settings. The proxy server will be set to filter out all such requests by a variety of methods.  The most common one will be a huge list of URLs containing all the dodgy one page, Glype proxy installations online.

So, you need to bypass this proxy server, or do you?

If the organisation has their network set up properly then even by using an alternative browser or modifying the proxy settings in IE will not work anyway.  The reason is that your company firewall, the hardware device which controls all the traffic in and out of your network should only allow web traffic out from one specific address – the proxy server.   So, forget about specific IPs, free web proxies or anything specific like a UK VPN or proxy until you figure this part out.  Remember in this scenario if you bypass the company proxy then your request will not get through, it needs to come from that specific IP address or it will get blocked.

Then a couple of things might happen –

• The alert will be flagged on the firewall (Web requests from an incorrect internal client)
• The administrator will track down the PC and find out it’s been modified.

But don’t worry in reality probably nobody ever looks at the logs and most firewalls generate so many alerts that nobody ever looks at those either.

The point is your searching for online web proxies is simply a waste of time.  To bypass most corporate proxies, you need to go through that proxy and not around it.  Through it because any other originating IP address will get blocked and may possibly wake up your IT Department.  But you need to stop the proxy blocking access based on the content (what you are requesting) and the URL (the actual site you want to visit).

There are two things you can do to allow this – first you need encryption so that nothing can see inside your web request and secondly you need some low-key server outside the network to relay your request.  These two requirements if implemented correctly will allow you to tunnel through any corporate network firewall or proxy and also keep your surfing private from the administrators and logs.   I should point out that the new generation of Smart DNS servers like this, may be more effective in a lockdown environment that standard proxies although it’s likely you’ll need admin access on your local pc in order to modify the network settings, as generally these will all be assigned automatically via DHCP.