I might have to tunnel their bullshit traffic through a VPN.
Yeah do it, even if you fixed the issue. Been on VPN ever since the mandatory metadata collection nonsense was introduced in this country. It offers other benefits as well, such as being able to stream from geolocked services. I also noticed less probing traffic against my external IP, such as port scans from russia and china. And also, it's a bit safer to, erm, do activities that involves a sabre and an eye patch.