Proxy issues

[Isley6628]

I am sorry if this is not the correct place for this but I am hoping that someone here might be able to help me. I provide technical support for schools and ran into an issue. Before I worked for the schools they used to have a proxy server and got rid of it before I came to the schools. On a lot of computers across the county they just disabled the proxy settings instead of removing them all together. Well all of a sudden about a week ago the proxy settings across the network that were just disabled suddenly kicked back on after being off for a couple of years. I also spoke with a tech from the local private school and the same thing happened to them at the same time it happened to us. I solved the issue easily by deleting out the proxy settings but that doesn't fix whatever the underlying issue is that caused this to occur. I ran a lot of different softwares, malware bytes, avg, spybot, etc.. and even tried the premium trials for a few paid softwares and nothing was found. Also the computers are not on active directory. So my question is does anyone know what could have caused this? Do I need to be worried about a possible new virus affecting the schools that antivirus hasn't picked up on yet.

 

[Spud1200]

I am sorry if this is not the correct place for this but I am hoping that someone here might be able to help me. I provide technical support for schools and ran into an issue. Before I worked for the schools they used to have a proxy server and got rid of it before I came to the schools. On a lot of computers across the county they just disabled the proxy settings instead of removing them all together. Well all of a sudden about a week ago the proxy settings across the network that were just disabled suddenly kicked back on after being off for a couple of years. I also spoke with a tech from the local private school and the same thing happened to them at the same time it happened to us. I solved the issue easily by deleting out the proxy settings but that doesn't fix whatever the underlying issue is that caused this to occur. I ran a lot of different softwares, malware bytes, avg, spybot, etc.. and even tried the premium trials for a few paid softwares and nothing was found. Also the computers are not on active directory. So my question is does anyone know what could have caused this? Do I need to be worried about a possible new virus affecting the schools that antivirus hasn't picked up on yet.

I'm certainly no expert and someone more knowledgeable will be able to answer better than me but what about human interference from anyone of the pupils.

Can you be more specific as to what happened. Is their a hierarchy of system administration across the network for various districts.

What about the proxy settings simply being disabled for a period of time until that time they kicked back on.

If you ran various software ect: to determine viruses ect. was their any questionable activity other than that of an obvious virus. Any higher than normal network traffic. Anything suspicious.

How big is the project you are monitoring.

 

[Isley6628]

I monitor 5 schools and I happens that the day the proxy servers kicked back on I was out. Only myself my supervisor and the other technician knows the password to the admin account to be able to edit the information. Like I said it's just weird that it appears to have happened so widespread at about the same time. Another thing the private school has the same service provider so that's why I was thinking maybe a virus had infested the network. And i could believe human interference if it was just our school system but to happen to ours plus the private school. I don't know.

 

[carnageX]

Sounds like a group policy getting pushed out, or a script being run.

Is the proxy being routed through a local device/appliance or is it being set to something not on your network?

 

[Isley6628]

The proxy was located on a server hosted by the internet provider. But that proxy server has been completely offline for a a few years. They used to have deep freeze installed on some computers and so I considered that being the cause of the problem but I found a lot of the computers that it happened to are computers that were installed after they stopped using deep freeze. I did call the internet provider but they said they have no way of forcing the proxy settings.