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ZoneZealot | on: Residential proxies detected on White House network
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.

cpburns2009 | parent | next
This isn't a theoretical problem either. My employer's website was being hammered by residential proxies a month ago. It wasn't until we setup WAF captcha rules that they mostly subsided. It wasn't even the typical exploit scanner. I don't know what the purpose was but it was effectively a DDoS.
cowlevel | root | parent
Everyone's is. Far as anyone can tell, it's probably AI companies.
cpburns2009 | root | parent
It wasn't any sensible AI scraper. It kept requesting the same pages a thousand times over.
cowlevel | root | parent
Yep that's what AI scrapers do
loading story #50378836
superjan | parent | next
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?
rcxdude | root | parent | next
It's definitely not all VPNs (typically the ones you pay for will buy their own hardware and internet connections in the places you can route your traffic through), but it is a common situation for the shadier (especially 'free') ones, and in that case it's usually not just a peer-to-peer thing, they make money by selling your connection to people who pay because they want a large pool of relatively reputable and disconnected IPs to send traffic through.
ZoneZealot | root | parent | next
You're right, a lot of 'free VPN' software also uses your own internet as a residential proxy. It's often mentioned in the ToS but the users don't read that.
dylan604 | root | parent | next
Honestly, I expect any of those free VPN services that require an app install to be doing precisely this. At this point, I just assume anything with "free" in it will cost me more than if I just paid for something instead.
rustyhancock | root | parent
I'm surprised it doesn't cause more chaos, even as simple as people getting copyright infringement notices from their ISP?
charcircuit | root | parent
That kind of VPN is considered a residential proxy.
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