The danger here, of course, is that while these compromised devices are currently being monetized in a relatively benign way (other than bandwidth costs to the user, which to be sure can be nontrivial)… it would be naive to assume that there isn't a Command and Control capability that can assign less benign tasking - or can be compromised to do so.
This also puts some of the troubling reports that politicians were bringing phones into SCIFs into context…
On a server that used to get below 1k HTTP requests a day, I've had several cases of mass scraping from these botnets exceeding 100req/s. The web is getting harder and harder to use due to all the anti-bot mechanisms site operators had to put up.
A compromised device inside the White House network could presumably be doing something _much_ worse than participating in a DDOS against random websites.
My most worrisome IoT device I have on my network is a digital picture frame my wife connected, but I was surprised the company routinely updates it even though it's on Android 6 (!).
Step one, find your public IP, I like ipinfo.io but there are many other services that will show it. Then pop it into a tool like the one that's hosting TFA[1]
Unexpected traffic would be the biggest gross red flag. If it constrains itself to moving traffic when it's otherwise perform its desired function (if it's one of those "free TV" boxes and it only proxies when you're playing video) it might be hard to tease-out the unwanted traffic purely looking at bytes in/out.
Beyond that gross metric you're getting into capturing traffic and decoding it.
Check network traffic from smart devices would be a good start. If your TV does gigabytes of traffic in the night when you don’t use it, it most likely is acting as a residential proxy.
There exist services that will pay you a fraction of money to host their residential proxy service on a computer you own. But I do think the majority of residential proxies are hijacked.
I wouldn't call turning on CloudFlare's bot blocker an "absurd amount of effort" from the perspective of site owners.
But getting around it sure is annoying, sometimes I get flagged IP's from Comcast and can't visit sites like costco.com despite not doing any questionable stuff on my network.
Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet
So important that we have to trick people into using them. Remember when folks were running SETI@Home? Of course you do, because it was widely thought to be a good thing, and folks willingly signed up.
How many would buy the "box" if the advertising were honest about what's actually in the box?
And making DDoS-attacks nigh impossible to IP block.
Residential proxies are in many cases at least shady, both on the side of who uses them and for what and on providers that are often not above using dark pattern to hide them in some innocuous app for a smart-whatever that silently runs a proxy on a unaware user's connection. And in many places in the world if illegal stuff in done using your connection you are liable, regardless if you knew about it.
Most tools can be dual-use. Residential proxies are also used by malevolent actors to hack infrastructure or financial institutions and let some other poor soul get investigated for it. This is why we can't have nice things.
True, though unfortunately people can not be trusted to declare their intentions so the residential proxies will ultimately have to be sacrificed and given they are fairly easy to identify by behavior I could foresee the feds now having a reason to round 'em up faster. They already took out NetNut, IPIDEA, SocksEscort, Doppellganger and the "Kim Wolf" Offshoots.
Virtually all of it is the product of malware. This is like you saying that robbery is very important because you like buying cheap tools at pawnshops.
It's described at a high level in media often. Here's more detail though:
Person buys a product, or downloads some software - that unknowing to them, was reaching out to a central server elsewhere to establish a network tunnel. And over that tunnel, the other server routes traffic onto that person's home network. Which can then of course go onto the internet, and it appears like the traffic originated from their home internet connection.
Other people rent access to this network. The goal being, you have surreptitious access to appear as any one of tens of thousands of home network IP addresses on the public internet. Bad guys can use this to rotate through many different IP addresses when their access gets blocked because of malicious (or benign but unwanted) behavior on the internet. Residential IP addresses are more 'valuable' because they don't have the negative connotation that datacentre and commercial IPs can have, and they can be spread geographically or across many ISPs.
A very common way for people being a part of these residential proxy networks is by buying dodgy streaming boxes, and also installing shady apps on TV app marketplaces.
It means some networked devices in there are being remotely piloted to tunnel network traffic to somewhere else. This scenario usually happens with more "unprofessional" ISPs, which sell bandwidth from their networked clients for people in need of such services.
Such as ignoring web scraping countermeasures, and DDoS.
There are companies that provide proxy services for scraping services, and residential proxies route through consumer networks (like Comcast) which is flagged less than a datacenter IP.
Many questionable TV streaming boxes pretend to deliver you video, but in reality they are also piggy backing on your personal ISP to power those companies.
> Residential proxy services sell access to everyday devices, letting customers send traffic through them so it appears to come from that device's network.
There are services you can pay for such that you can route internet traffic thru a specific IP in a specific part of the world. People (usually unwillingly and unknowingly) run software that effectively makes them part of a giant botnet. A computer running in Romania might have some kind of weather application or gambling/casino app that I could use to make an HTTP request as if I were on their network. So if you need access to 1,000 or 10,000 IP's to circumvent rate limits or perform crawling tasks, this is how you could do it.
Seems like the president found a business opportunity and gave internal orders to rent out the network infrastructure to 'ethically sourced' providers :^) Jokes aside, might be some infected IoT crap.
I mean supply chain-attacks are everywhere. Smart-TV's with certain marketplace apps, IoT devices. Also, I'm surprised the white house's network is not monitored more.
The danger here, of course, is that while these compromised devices are currently being monetized in a relatively benign way (other than bandwidth costs to the user, which to be sure can be nontrivial)… it would be naive to assume that there isn't a Command and Control capability that can assign less benign tasking - or can be compromised to do so.
This also puts some of the troubling reports that politicians were bringing phones into SCIFs into context…
> benign
On a server that used to get below 1k HTTP requests a day, I've had several cases of mass scraping from these botnets exceeding 100req/s. The web is getting harder and harder to use due to all the anti-bot mechanisms site operators had to put up.
How is DDOSing every site on the web benign?
Relatively benign.
A compromised device inside the White House network could presumably be doing something _much_ worse than participating in a DDOS against random websites.
> This also puts some of the troubling reports that politicians were bringing phones into SCIFs into context…
I mean politicians are so addicted to twitter the nsa makes special phones…
Gotta have your SuperBox set up to watch 24 hr cable news working late into the night.
I have seen these at mall kiosks advertising "free cable", and today I learned they are proxying from your home network.
That was the first thing I thought of!
Out of curiosity, how would I check my own device for a residential proxy?
Scroll down to "anonymization": https://ipinfo.io/what-is-my-ip
Fantastic question. There is so much IOT garbage out there that someone might slip into my network, what can I do to easily detect it?
I was aghast when my partner connected a pet watering bowl to the WiFi.
My most worrisome IoT device I have on my network is a digital picture frame my wife connected, but I was surprised the company routinely updates it even though it's on Android 6 (!).
https://support.frameo.com/hc/en-us/articles/23433637149842-...
Watch egress at the router for anything unaccounted for, tbh.
So they don't actually know what this network is, just who owns the IP space... time for a blog post to advertise our week-old service!
There is no evidence that physically ties this to the WH. It could be in a security lab for all they know. Or a guest network for the news media.
Perhaps ping time measurements could help identify where the devices are physically located.
How would one detect this on their home network and protect themselves from?
Step one, find your public IP, I like ipinfo.io but there are many other services that will show it. Then pop it into a tool like the one that's hosting TFA[1]
1: https://layer3intel.com/context
Unexpected traffic would be the biggest gross red flag. If it constrains itself to moving traffic when it's otherwise perform its desired function (if it's one of those "free TV" boxes and it only proxies when you're playing video) it might be hard to tease-out the unwanted traffic purely looking at bytes in/out.
Beyond that gross metric you're getting into capturing traffic and decoding it.
Check network traffic from smart devices would be a good start. If your TV does gigabytes of traffic in the night when you don’t use it, it most likely is acting as a residential proxy.
Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet, they allow scraping for archiving, automation and can be used for extra anonymity.
While they have grown a bit too much, they are a natural response to the absurd amount of effort every website is pouring into anti-scraping tech.
> Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet, they allow scraping for archiving, automation and can be used for extra anonymity.
Aren't they almost always run unknowingly, by people tricked into running them?
There exist services that will pay you a fraction of money to host their residential proxy service on a computer you own. But I do think the majority of residential proxies are hijacked.
Leveraging compromised devices is a very important part of the Internet??? This is an incredibly twisted perspective.
Help me understand. As far as I'm aware, these residential proxies are almost always malware.
"Malware is an important part of the Internet"
> and can be used for extra anonymity
Great, so you can conduct illegal transactions and have some unsuspecting grandma take the blame and have her front door kicked in?
I wouldn't call turning on CloudFlare's bot blocker an "absurd amount of effort" from the perspective of site owners.
But getting around it sure is annoying, sometimes I get flagged IP's from Comcast and can't visit sites like costco.com despite not doing any questionable stuff on my network.
Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet
So important that we have to trick people into using them. Remember when folks were running SETI@Home? Of course you do, because it was widely thought to be a good thing, and folks willingly signed up.
How many would buy the "box" if the advertising were honest about what's actually in the box?
Did a residential proxy provider write this
Huh, and I wonder why I've been getting tons of "you might be a bot" CAPTCHA challenges from Google lately.
Frontier lab training data “collector”
And making DDoS-attacks nigh impossible to IP block.
Residential proxies are in many cases at least shady, both on the side of who uses them and for what and on providers that are often not above using dark pattern to hide them in some innocuous app for a smart-whatever that silently runs a proxy on a unaware user's connection. And in many places in the world if illegal stuff in done using your connection you are liable, regardless if you knew about it.
Hard disagree. They are malware 99.9% of the time. The utility does not erase the fact they are abusive.
s/Residential proxies/DDoS networks/, then re-read your comment.
Most tools can be dual-use. Residential proxies are also used by malevolent actors to hack infrastructure or financial institutions and let some other poor soul get investigated for it. This is why we can't have nice things.
They're also used by the good guys who are going after those exact same bad guys.
True, though unfortunately people can not be trusted to declare their intentions so the residential proxies will ultimately have to be sacrificed and given they are fairly easy to identify by behavior I could foresee the feds now having a reason to round 'em up faster. They already took out NetNut, IPIDEA, SocksEscort, Doppellganger and the "Kim Wolf" Offshoots.
>absurd amount of effort every website is pouring into anti-scraping tech.
Maybe some people do not want to provide their entire website as free training material to [insert LLM lab here]?
Virtually all of it is the product of malware. This is like you saying that robbery is very important because you like buying cheap tools at pawnshops.
NSA honeypots
But her e-mail server!
What is a residential proxy?
It's described at a high level in media often. Here's more detail though:
Person buys a product, or downloads some software - that unknowing to them, was reaching out to a central server elsewhere to establish a network tunnel. And over that tunnel, the other server routes traffic onto that person's home network. Which can then of course go onto the internet, and it appears like the traffic originated from their home internet connection.
Other people rent access to this network. The goal being, you have surreptitious access to appear as any one of tens of thousands of home network IP addresses on the public internet. Bad guys can use this to rotate through many different IP addresses when their access gets blocked because of malicious (or benign but unwanted) behavior on the internet. Residential IP addresses are more 'valuable' because they don't have the negative connotation that datacentre and commercial IPs can have, and they can be spread geographically or across many ISPs.
A very common way for people being a part of these residential proxy networks is by buying dodgy streaming boxes, and also installing shady apps on TV app marketplaces.
I was expecting that VPN’s (maybe not all) also use their own customers as relays, but you don’t mention them. Am I wrong?
It means some networked devices in there are being remotely piloted to tunnel network traffic to somewhere else. This scenario usually happens with more "unprofessional" ISPs, which sell bandwidth from their networked clients for people in need of such services.
Such as ignoring web scraping countermeasures, and DDoS.
There are companies that provide proxy services for scraping services, and residential proxies route through consumer networks (like Comcast) which is flagged less than a datacenter IP.
Many questionable TV streaming boxes pretend to deliver you video, but in reality they are also piggy backing on your personal ISP to power those companies.
Even not so questionable TV's do this too. https://spur.us/blog/smart-tv-apps-residential-proxy-sdks
>Many questionable TV streaming boxes
+ Sketchy Apps
+ Malware
+ Weird Android Variants
The 4th sentence in the article has a link to What is a Residential Proxy?[0]
[0]: https://layer3intel.com/what-is-a-residential-proxy
From the article:
> Residential proxy services sell access to everyday devices, letting customers send traffic through them so it appears to come from that device's network.
Essentially lets bad actors use your home network.
There are services you can pay for such that you can route internet traffic thru a specific IP in a specific part of the world. People (usually unwillingly and unknowingly) run software that effectively makes them part of a giant botnet. A computer running in Romania might have some kind of weather application or gambling/casino app that I could use to make an HTTP request as if I were on their network. So if you need access to 1,000 or 10,000 IP's to circumvent rate limits or perform crawling tasks, this is how you could do it.
Second paragraph
Seems like the president found a business opportunity and gave internal orders to rent out the network infrastructure to 'ethically sourced' providers :^) Jokes aside, might be some infected IoT crap.
I buy and use residential proxies, though.
I mean supply chain-attacks are everywhere. Smart-TV's with certain marketplace apps, IoT devices. Also, I'm surprised the white house's network is not monitored more.
Monitoring is the easy part, remedying the problems has proved harder. From early in the first Trump administration:
https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/what-can-we-...
That is not an environment for serious people anymore so that's expected.
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probably something IOT with a vulnerability, happens all the time.
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Vibe coders really having fun on their side quests these days