A colleague suggested adding these settins to the knime.ini file. I added it belwo the -vmargs line. And it solved my problem on a large internal network getting strange messages when trying to update KNIME. From my understanding it basically increases the timeout for the operations.
-Dorg.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.excludeContributors=org.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.httpclient4
-Dorg.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.retrieve.closeTimeout=3000
-Dorg.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.retrieve.readTimeout=3000