"Your connection is not private" for specific website, once when opening a new tab

Question

Like many, since March, I've been working from home and using the company's VPN to do my work.

Recently, if I open a new tab in Chrome, and navigate to "news.bbc.co.uk", I got the aforementioned error, with the supplemental information being:

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from news.bbc.co.uk.x.878874e0029b7043d30ab470050dec81a4e1.9270fd51.id.opendns.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more

• This only happened when I opened a new tab.
• It did not happen for any other site that I visited, just the BBC.
• When I opened a new tab, and typed https://news.bbc.co.uk it (correctly) had no issue.
• After forcing https as above, opening a new tab and just typing news.bbc.co.uk it worked.
• A few minutes later, just typing news.bbc.co.uk once again causes a Privacy Error.

I was wondering why this is just happening to the BBC site, and no others, and what the redirect URL means (with OpenDNS). When it fails, this is what is in the address bar:

https://news.bbc.co.uk.x.878874e0029b7043d30ab470050dec81a4e1.9270fd51.id.opendns.com/h/news.bbc.co.uk/?X-OpenDNS-Session=_878874e0029b7043d30ab470050dec81a4e19270fd51_eMU5iVa1_

Answer 1

Domains ending in .id.opendns.com are what OpenDNS uses to display the error pages for their Content Filtering service.

There are three likely possibilities for what is happening, but there is no easy way for us to tell you which is correct.

Possibilities #1 and #3 assume that somehow your computer is looking at multiple DNS servers (which could make sense if you are on a VPN). One of those DNS servers is returning the correct result, while the other is OpenDNS which is redirecting you to a block page. (For possibility #2, this is not necessarily the case.)

1. Your home IP address recently changed and the person who had it before you was using OpenDNS at home and chose to block this site. If this is the case, you can create a free "OpenDNS Home" account, add your IP address to it (which should remove that IP address from the previous holder's account), and turn off all blocking.

2. If your ISP uses "Carrier Grade NAT" to make multiple consumers share a single public IP address, there could be multiple people sharing the same public address as you, and at least two of them have OpenDNS blocking service set to block this site. Their two accounts are fighting with each other for control of that IP address. You can check if you are behind CGN to eliminate this possiblity.

3. Your work is trying to block access to non-work sites over the VPN - either they want to reduce load on the VPN servers or they buy into the myth that this will "improve productivity". In the former case, they could reconfigure the AnyConnect VPN to only pass traffic for specific IP ranges. In the latter case, they are deliberately trying to block this site and failing to do it properly. (This case is less likely, since it wouldn't make much sense for this to be the only site they block.)

If you disconnect from the VPN, do you ever have this problem?