So in January last year, I was attacked by cyber criminals, repeatedly launching DDoS attacks against my home network. This actually caused a lot of disruption to my internet access for a few days. All credit to Virgin for listening to me, and replacing my hub, which of couse gave me a new IP address so they could not DDoS me anymore. The criminals also threated to send me a "letter bomb" claiming they had my home address, which they lied about! They did obtain my phone numbers and harassed me on the phone for 2 weeks, passing my number to crypto scammers who also proceeded to harass me for 2 weeks, who spammed me with over 100 calls, attempting to get me to invest in a fake scam crypto company (suffice to say that I never gave them any info - or money). I ended up having to get all my numbers changed. As an extra measure, I have a second line on pay as you go for online use, and don't give out my real number online anymore. Esstentially, it is a disposable number. It works out much safer.
Ever since this incident, which my local Police force have investigated, I have upped my security online, this includes enabling a minimum of 2FA on every online account that supports it, and using a VPN whenever I go online, which may explain why my first attempt at access to this community failed with a "you have been banned" message, perhaps because someone had used that particular VPN server and did something on here that caused a ban to be issued.
I have a suggestion for Virgin to up security on its site as a whole. Use a minimum of 2FA!
Also, it may be a good idea to add the ability to install an ability to use VPN's at the hub level. This may require a lot of firmware modifications, however this will help to keep customers much safer than using apps on thier PC's to do so. While I do understand that a certain minority (such as those from January last year) use VPN's to hide thier activities, those such as myself require it to keep secure and make it far more diffcult for criminals to DDoS me, especially when I am playing games. It may be a good idea that when adding the ability to connect to a VPN, that you add a check box to "auto connect to best server" or similar option. This will ensure that if the server goes offline, or it is DDoS'ed for whatever reason, the hub's software will automatically seek out a new server and connect to it automatically, minimising downtime for the customer, in the meantime, internet access will be disabled until a new server is connected, this is the best security one could ask for in my view.
In this day and age, with all the cyber threats going around from criminals, I feel this measure is required to protect customers. This is partly because your own network is not very good at mitigating DDoS attacks, as I have experienced myself. I feel that when gamers are DDoS'ed everyone suffers with laggy connections on your service, and as a gamer, I know how frustrating that can be.
VPN services such as for example "NordVPN" have built in mitigation and protection against viruses and malware built in, so the ability to add this to your hubs would be of huge benefit to every customer of Virgin Media.
Please let me know if you are planning this in the very near future.
I remind you this is 2023, and it should be an option already!
Perhaps Virgin Media could collaborate or work with NordVPN to make this a possibility, and into reality at some point.
