They’re too polite to say it explicitly, but when they say:
> Most of the activity happens in the evening, Eastern time: about half of it falls between 5 p.m. and midnight, and almost none happens in the early morning. That pattern suggests a person rather than a public guest Wi-Fi network: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening, whose device is infected with a proxy SDK. Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them.
There really aren’t very many candidates for who that person might be and it really seems like it would be someone who, I don’t know, maybe lives where the traffic is originating.
I'm no expert but even I've read that "Works at the White House" is bigger than the executive residence and oval office, including the West Wing and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways. The National Security Council maintains 24-hour watch operations in the Situation Room (which is more a 'complex' than 'room'), while regional desk officers routinely work late evenings to overlap with morning business hours in Europe and Asia.
I asked Gemini if my recollection was correct and got: "The EOP network (managed by the EOP Office of Administration in coordination with Presidential Information Technology Community entities like the White House Communications Agency) operates as a single campus enterprise network. Its high-speed backbone links the West Wing, the EEOB, the East Wing, and nearby administrative facilities such as the New Executive Office Building (NEOB) on 17th Street."
So, definitely an issue that there's a device with some rogue malware installed but the total workforce across all shifts at the White House Complex is roughly between 2,500 and 4,000.
the show that came out recently, The Residence, while obviously fiction, made me think about the white house as a semi-public event venue in near constant use by dozens if not hundreds of people. It made for an interesting setting for a whodunit.
Of course it is. It's "The People's House." Look up the Great Cheese Levy of 1837, Lincoln's Office Hours, Coolidge's reception on New Years 1927 or Jackie Kennedy literally giving an "MTV Cribs" on TV in 1962. Or consider, if you can remember, the outcry when they permanently closed Pennslvania Avenue in 1995. Or when they closed Lafayette Square in 2020.
Do you believe the availability of wifi for staff/guests is somehow unreasonable? Or, is there a belief that no internet (wifi or cellular) connected devices are allowed on premises? Is them using cellular data, rather than a guest network, somehow more secure?
No idea. I’ve never been to the White House. For all I know they have an Potus WiFi and Aides WiFi and a EndlessFoxNewsAndRacistMemes WiFi. Maybe there’s also a Peasant WiFi for the cleaning staff and press corps.
If it keeps happening I think that at least suggests the source is someone or some people who are “above the rules” most people would be bound by. You can tell the cleaning crew to get off the damned WiFi, others not so much.
As someone elsewhere in the thread noted, this could well be the press. Could also be that this isn’t the White House network at all despite that attribution.
Right, we know the White House owns that public IP, but this could be as bad as an unsecured, unmanaged device that is joined to a private network that is supposed to be secured, OR, on the “all the way good” side, that IP could be the exit for a completely throwaway, untrusted, isolated LAN segment meant only for some iOT device and which has no route to any other peer on the LAN side, and some civilian who has access to that for work brought in his laptop with a “free VPN!” Plugin and joined it to that network because it’s all he had credentials for.
The White House doesn't shut down at 5pm. There's whole books, TV series, and movies about the people that are working late every night at the White House. Likely dozens of people are on staff and work shifts that last until midnight every night of the week.
Service staff, including the storied hundred or so White House butlers, work whatever hours are needed. Then you have Secret Service, Kitchen staff, Natalie, house admin staff like the Chief Usher, maybe even NPS staff as the WH grounds are a national park as well, any of whom I would assume might be given access to unsecured WH wifi and likely a government-issued device. One device with a proxy among all of those people? Entirely unsurprising.
Maybe it's just the printer that Natalie carries around in her purse.
Even at midnight I can't imagine there being less than 100 people working at the WH in various capacities. While it's probably not the duty/desk officers in the Situation Room/Security Council, there are plenty of maintenance staff that work at night. 5-midnight seems like it overlaps perfectly with a shift schedule.
But how many of them would risk their job by smuggling in a device that violates government policies? Every device in the White House should be accounted for and meeting a number of security criteria. There are really only two or three people there who would know that those rules don't apply to them.
They are not saying that is _on purpose_, in fact they are saying the opposite: a compromised device, could be even an Android phone. It could also be as device planted on purpose, of course.
You’re misreading what this says. It’s someone bringing in a device they managed to get infected.
Oh and also the part where no one has caught this internally which is possibly the bigger takeaway. It’s a zero-trust network made out of incompetence.
There's nothing in the article that suggests it's not just the guest wifi. Which wouldn't be monitored. Why would you? The whole point is that it's segmented and can't actually interact with anything important.
Eh, I would not be surprised if they have a separate wifi that guests can use and you can hook up your private devices to. Basically every large company i have worked for, for the last two decades had that. I suspect deep in the bowels of the White House you don’t get good reception.
Why are you assuming the person knows and is actively smuggling in the device? And why would you then assume that person is more significant than a shift worker there?
If you regard 1,000 or less people as few, then this is true. If you regard 1,000 people as "too many" then you rate the national security of the USA at the cost of 1 in 1000 means it's not worth bothing to find out.
Unless it is running on a government issued iPhone, it is not the Individual #1 you are alluding to.
He very famously does not know how to use computers and can only basically manage tweeting from his phone, which he is mostly not, actually, doing himself.
Now, there are two or three terminally online people around him. I would be more quick to point the finger at his foul-mouthed spokesman but it’s admittedly because I hate that guy and he seems rather stupid. But perhaps it could be the devoted portable printer lady, or the overpromoted unblinking former golf caddy guy.
All of them are around to help with the, er, modern day presidential communications.
> He very famously does not know how to use computers and can only basically manage tweeting from his phone, which he is mostly not, actually, doing himself.
There’s a ton of people it could be. Any staffer that works 5-12, which wouldn’t be a particularly weird shift for cooks, cleaners, etc that bring their infected phone with them.
If it was someone who lived there it wouldn’t be exclusively that time period. Why wouldn’t it happen overnight or in the morning or any other time of day?
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.
> The web is getting harder and harder to use due to all the anti-bot mechanisms site operators had to put up.
Indeed. I recently set up a bot on my local machine that I can interact with via Telegram. I gave it the ability to retrieve the contents of a URL via Playwright (with modifications). Basic things like getting the Readability view and getting the site as Markdown with links.
I was essentially mimicking the feature OpenAI etc offer where it can do a web search for you and get you the answer you seek. I just didn't want to pay a company for that feature.
It's not autonomous. It only acts when I tell it to. The actual search is via the Kagi API, but the URL contents is via Playwright. I also ensured it can't do lots of requests at a time. There's a mandatory (random) sleep of between 1 and 5 seconds between two requests.
In less than a week, I've been flagged. When I do a Google search (as a human), I have to prove I'm human. Many sites have simply blocked me - I can't buy stuff from various vendors[1], I cannot access several news sites, etc.
The thing is, I didn't really access that many sites with the bot! At most it's the equivalent of someone mildly addicted to the web. Yet they caught me quickly.
Obviously, I disabled the bot's capability to get site content. I wonder how long my IP will be in the blacklist.
I know some people will say "Good riddance" to the outcome and to what I did. I'd love to have a real, serious discussion on whether what I did was immoral. But whatever your thoughts on the matter, do ponder over the fact that the system has made it hard for average Joes like you and me to have this "feature", but if you pay a giant tech company a monthly fee, you can have it.
[1] Thankfully, Amazon didn't block me. In the past I'd avoid them, but now I'm in the dilemma where I don't want to buy stuff from sites that make it difficult for me to buy stuff from them!
Expect to remain blocked, that's how defense works, some services plenty use will have is bot or known proxy exit node set to true, and some websites use the same defense services, request velocity is just one factor, if you don't have random human like scrolling and jitter with a bot, it's a dead profile walking, metaphorically speaking
Doesn't work like that, only on mobile phones you can toggle airplane mode to get a new ip assigned and cgnat makes sure mobile ips are "trusted" , but they fingerprint you beyond ip address
That is entirely ISP dependent and many don't actually work like that. Your cable modem gets a specific IP for as long as Comcast or whoever sees fit, restarting does nothing on the WAN side.
While your server handles that, what does your CPU do with the other 99% of available cycles?
I run https://bunnystomp.com on an Always Free VM from a major cloud provider. It handles 1,930 req/s at 33 ms latency with no tuning/optimization. It's literally just python behind cloudflare.
You seem to know a lot about my server. From what I could see, all cores were pinned to 100%, but maybe my budget AMD CPU is hiding fantastical amounts of compute from the kernel. I'd love to know how to make use of it.
I have no idea what the site you linked does, but it doesn't look like a cgit instance to me; that's what got hammered on my end, and when hosting it, one very quickly finds out that many git operations are CPU-bound.
If you want credibility from the get-go, you need to be up front about your application. I certainly took it to be a generic host for an unpopular site in your first comment.
I'll just note that "compromised" is perhaps too strong. These services often come from VPN plugins (eg Hola VPN) that lets users watch sports from different restricted geographic regions. There is a trade here that's in the TOs: you get someone else's IP address, they get yours.
If I'm using one of these services while connected to a guest wifi network, with the usual configuration for guest access (like no intranet connections), is that guest wifi network compromised? What's the threat model?
What part of that isn’t technically “compromised”? You can argue there’s no evidence of it currently being weaponized but I’d say some shitbird running a free vpn inside the White House is not a good look regardless.
Not sure which direction you're intending this. The NSA is making special phones to protect politicians, or to make it easier to ensure they can read everything?
> There is no evidence that physically ties this to the WH.
They don't need to be physically inside a specific building to be a networking security problem.
The core issue is whether an outsider has bypassed your firewall and can send+receive traffic from a node which is getting more trust than it deserves. If they've compromised the computer's microphone/camera/wifi-control that's an additional problem.
You can only _add_ jitter. So presumably you make people think you're farther away than you really are. I guess if you're especially clever, you can manufacture responses to packets you haven't sent yet to throw people off.
Interesting! According to this, a lot more going on beyond the residential proxy element, which was the only bit I had considered (or heard about). I wish there was an accompanying article with some more specifics.
Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to run connected devices on my network that do run software I can reasonably trust. This is also why every computer, phone or appliance I own runs Linux. This includes my TV box, which I recently migrated to an x86 port of Android with Claude's help.
That is the least bad thing they could do btw. Unless your internet is data restricted, go for it if you want free cable. If questioned by your ISP (extremely unlikely but theoretically possible) pretend you have no idea what they're talking about.
Firewall it from your local network if you want to - it'll still work - they're not after that.
I have T-mobile 5g. My IP shows up as a residential proxy. I can't control the T-Mobile 5g device. It's a black-box. And, I only have one Linux desktop on the home network (so no Windows/Mac malware).
Not sure why my IP is listed as a residential proxy.
There’s only that many ipv4 addresses and I believe all 5G are shared ones. That’s why they’re among the most valuable ip ranges for scraping. You can’t just naively ban that IP or you’ll ban a large group of users
It should be a balancing act though, somewhere between what you said and my first sentence.
Rate limiting, or additional layers of input sanitisation for IP addresses known to have been malicious in the past.
It's unfortunate that good users will have to endure some difficulties because of bad users on the same network, but if security is the priority, then measures must be taken, you shouldn't just leave to door open to potentially known bad users / traffic.
IPv4 is a shared resource, but some ranges have worse reputations than others, and all are owned by organisations that have the ability to monitor and filter for malicious traffic. It gets into a fraught discussion about censorship, but it is possible for network owners to monitor for, and block / restrict traffic detected as 'bad'. It's just a matter of cost and scale, and those that put the effort in should have their users rewarded with fewer 'trust-issues' roadblocks.
> It's unfortunate that good users will have to endure some difficulties because of bad users on the same network, but if security is the priority, then measures must be taken, you shouldn't just leave to door open to potentially known bad users / traffic
Is this like a corporate support response? I legit can't tell. Try explaining to a retail consumer why they can't buy from your site because they have TMobile service.
They’re saying T-Mobile should be monitoring traffic on their network and block traffic from bad actors that ruin it for everyone for everyone else? Or at least they do in the next paragraph.
When the bad actor is grandma who has an infected computer, T-Mobile will be dealing with a lot of support calls from objectively non-malicious actors.
The blocking of residential proxies might be the thing that moves the world to ipv6. These days what we need is a dynamic map of all the IPs running proxies so servers can block them. If every device gets it's own v6 address, you could block just the TV running the proxy. Modern crowd sourced security products could identify the proxies and share their IP live so you can ban and unban addresses as the device moves.
Not sure about US but where I live I can manually set the access point of my phones mobile network and it gives me a unique ipv4 (new one each time in fact)
Google just banned a chinese Android tv manufacturer for backdooring and installing malware on their devices. This I think is such a device someone pirate sports or porn streaming device.
Freaky. They have a page explaining the concept (https://ipinfo.io/data/residential-proxy); when I checked it, there was a FOUC showing a full-screen, stretched image of what I think was Dario Amodei's face.
Neat. I almost said "surely this will only detect if your internet connection is itself being routed through a residential proxy", and then I realised that's effectively the same thing!
It detects if your IP is a residential proxy, not if you are using a residential proxy. From the perspective of the outside Internet, they are the same thing, the only one who cares about the difference is you.
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 (!).
I fear this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's the WH's own TOR node for any paying customer. It's manchurian candidate. It makes Clinton's emails look like ice cream.
Not all residential proxy providers are seedy - but I only know of one that isn't out of probably 20 or so major players so I guess fair call out on "infected".
Brightdata still sucks at disclosing to users that they're opted in to this and that their connection is being used for this. It's "on by default", not opt-in and often buried in an unskippable "Accept the terms" or dig-to-opt-out prompt.
I've never heard the term 'residential proxy' before, but it seems like a Tailscale exit node would qualify for example? This doesn't seem necessarily malicious or even inadvertently dangerous to me?
Residential IP addresses tend to have better reputations than datacenter networks, so there are providers who sell access to home internet connections. Oftentimes the people running the proxies have no idea they're running on their network, they're quasi malicious.
Generally not really. Residential proxies are services that can provide customers with the ability to send and receive traffic from a wide range of apparently legitimate networks (i.e. people's home internet connections). Almost always this is done without the informed consent of the person who owns the device that is used as a proxy, whether it be buried in some agreement somewhere or just outright malware.
The biggest danger is that said proxies can also allow access to internal networks, and as you might guess from how they are installed, are not usually operated by the most scrupulous of organizations.
it’s a well known term in shady markets of the internet, they allow users and abusers to bypass bans and create multiple accounts that cannot be linked with each other by networking intel
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some good answers in this thread. I had the same question but I'm still a tad confused:
* I initially thought this meant someone in the WH network was using commercial proxies to appear as if they were exiting from a different network (which would align with "some user is firing up a proxy on their phone to exit in a different location")
* But then the description of residential proxies seemed to align more with traffic hitting an endpoint in the White House, and _exiting_ from the network there. But this didn't explain the timing (why isn't it 24/7).
* Finally it sounds like some person, legitimately on the WH network, has a device (cell phone, TV, whatever) that, when activated, is proxying outside traffic into the WH network.
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.
I would actually feel better if this were the case, but given that we have "the very best people" currently running our cybersecurity infrastructure I doubt it.
Most likely scenario is a 20-something holdover from DOGE who accidentally had his phone p0wned while downloading groyper memes.
Most likely scenario is a janitor who installed an app (I'm guessing it was called LegitWorldCupWatch420696969) on his phone (which might be connecting to the wifi network from whatever locker he leaves it in while he's on the clock, the WH is not a giant SCIF). Or any number of other mundane, easy to overlook employees who work outside of the actual secured areas of the building.
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.
Let's assume the worst, that it's a VIP. Ok, now let's do some basic frequency statistics:
If you click the AS2650 link (1) in the article, you will learn that AS2650 is announcing 65,792 addresses in 5 prefixes. Roughly 40-70% of the IP addresses in a typical corporate ASN are associated with actual computers humans are using. Let's go with 40%. You're looking at 26,317 people. Assume they're all adults (please, dear lord, let them all be adults). 3-8% of the workforce is in IT. Let's go with 3%, that's 789 people. I'm guessing one of those 789 folks has thought this through and has a few VLANs set up to keep VIP and family-of-VIP, pattern of life stuff in a box.
As for the thesis that these are all window-licking low-IQ goons, that's just not how the US government cultivates its workforce. It's no accident that Harvard Business School characterizes themselves as "the West Point of capitalism." West Point isn't someone else's anything. The US Government is in it for the long haul and captures folks young with impossible-to-resist opportunities like the military academies, ROTC, SMART scholars, etc. Let's just stick with the academies: 12,000 people a year who were likely competitive for the Ivies, Division 1 athletics, or both, but chose their parents poorly. Free, top tier education and a job is very attractive for kids from fly-over states. Hell, in big states like California, New York, and Texas, it can actually be even more competitive. Something north of 60% of those graduates stick around for at least 20 years of service (because the high three pension + VA benefits is a pretty nice floor for retirement when your options back home are line supervisor at the cotton mill, the sugar mill, the coal mine, or ramp manager for United), usually addicted to the crazy level of mission. Sort of the opposite of finance where people really struggle mentally if they're not making pallets of money at an accelerating rate. Government service pays dogshit, but the work can super interesting, especially as you gain seniority.
Those folks then often loop back into other agencies and do another 20 years. Are there goombas in the Government? Oh, for sure. Absolutely. But it's roughly the same fraction as any other workforce in the rest of the economy.
But by the time you get to top tier stuff like the White House staff, the sorting function has been strong. To make the point: you also see top tier folks in other organizations with government stink on them. I can think of at least two directors at Google who are prior military. A fat pile of McKinsey folks. Something like 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs have served in the military, above the national average (6-7% of Americans have served in the military at some point).
And it's hilarious to watch people simultaneously assert the government is a bunch of idiots, and then get all excited about fighter pilots, the CIA, the CDC, ambassadors, the NIH. As though those people just appeared from the head of Zeus fully formed. Where do you think they worked when they were young? They were stamping visas for the Department of State in some embassy in central Asia. They were rolling blankets and digging wells in Gambia for the Peace Corps. Checking corporate filings for mostly unknown companies at SEC. Studying aerospace engineering at Embry Riddle and then flying cleared checks between clearing houses across the state overnight in a Cessna.
... and then Donald Trump as President, Stephen Miller as, whatever he is, and Peter Hegseth as Defense Secretary (he did serve in the military, if that's worth anything).
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.
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.
There are providers who claim they are ethically sourced, and that users have consented. Although I guess many are users who don't know or care that it is happening.
Ethically, if someone just wants to play a free game and doesn't care about it, is it okay? How knowledgable does a user have to be in order to have informed consent?
> There are providers who claim they are ethically sourced, and that users have consented. Although I guess many are users who don't know or care that it is happening.
Betcha that means there was "consent" language on page 55 of some click-through EULA.
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.
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?
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.
Some of the more legit providers have KYC in place, and do literally require you to declare you intentions to open an account, and block certain traffic proactively unless you can prove a legitimate use.
They list the IP addresses of all the residential proxies? Is there a link to the netsets of all the IPv4 addresses they are using I can download once a day? (preferably over rsync but git over https is fine too)
I don't think even the most "ethical" providers are going to volunteer that information, since that defeats the entire purpose of having a residential proxy in the first place.
No...? That's a completely different question than what we were talking about above? The customers of a residential proxy who would be subject to KYC are the people using the addresses -- this has nothing to do with the exit addresses of those who have joined the network.
That's a completely different question than what we were talking about above?
In fairness to me, I did say "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."
So it could be Alice. I know Alice has good intentions. It could be Bob, we know what Bob is up to but I will give him a pass regardless because Bob did nice things in the past. But then there is Mallory ... Mallory Malfoid is up to no good. I need to know which IP's are used by Alice and Bob so I can exclude them from my automated protections. Mallory will automatically get rate limited to 16kb/s, 1 HTTP request every 5 seconds and if they bounce around different residential proxies they get redirected to a bathtub regardless of which residential proxy they use.
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.
They’re too polite to say it explicitly, but when they say:
> Most of the activity happens in the evening, Eastern time: about half of it falls between 5 p.m. and midnight, and almost none happens in the early morning. That pattern suggests a person rather than a public guest Wi-Fi network: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening, whose device is infected with a proxy SDK. Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them.
There really aren’t very many candidates for who that person might be and it really seems like it would be someone who, I don’t know, maybe lives where the traffic is originating.
A lot of people work at the White House. Many of them doubtless work a night shift. The set of candidates here is actually quite large.
> A lot of people work at the White House.
I'm no expert but even I've read that "Works at the White House" is bigger than the executive residence and oval office, including the West Wing and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways. The National Security Council maintains 24-hour watch operations in the Situation Room (which is more a 'complex' than 'room'), while regional desk officers routinely work late evenings to overlap with morning business hours in Europe and Asia.
I asked Gemini if my recollection was correct and got: "The EOP network (managed by the EOP Office of Administration in coordination with Presidential Information Technology Community entities like the White House Communications Agency) operates as a single campus enterprise network. Its high-speed backbone links the West Wing, the EEOB, the East Wing, and nearby administrative facilities such as the New Executive Office Building (NEOB) on 17th Street."
So, definitely an issue that there's a device with some rogue malware installed but the total workforce across all shifts at the White House Complex is roughly between 2,500 and 4,000.
"and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways"
I ask in good faith, but why didn't you just say the Treasury Building?
Most people don't know that the Treasury Building is a big office building directly connected to the White House by basement walkways.
Fair point!
the show that came out recently, The Residence, while obviously fiction, made me think about the white house as a semi-public event venue in near constant use by dozens if not hundreds of people. It made for an interesting setting for a whodunit.
Of course it is. It's "The People's House." Look up the Great Cheese Levy of 1837, Lincoln's Office Hours, Coolidge's reception on New Years 1927 or Jackie Kennedy literally giving an "MTV Cribs" on TV in 1962. Or consider, if you can remember, the outcry when they permanently closed Pennslvania Avenue in 1995. Or when they closed Lafayette Square in 2020.
There used to be around the clock anti-nuclear vigils in Peace Park, with soup kitchens feeding folks who lived at their signs.
it is easy to correlate with known public travel...
But if you’re the cleaning staff at the White House do you just get on the WiFi?
Do you believe the availability of wifi for staff/guests is somehow unreasonable? Or, is there a belief that no internet (wifi or cellular) connected devices are allowed on premises? Is them using cellular data, rather than a guest network, somehow more secure?
No idea. I’ve never been to the White House. For all I know they have an Potus WiFi and Aides WiFi and a EndlessFoxNewsAndRacistMemes WiFi. Maybe there’s also a Peasant WiFi for the cleaning staff and press corps.
Well, there's certainly still a DOGE Starlink terminal up on the roof. (The one they didn't demolish.)
Even if it was active, that wouldn’t be part of this network, would it?
You can see lots at wigle.net But it's a noise of quite a few meme submissions and lots of useless HP OfficeJet and DIRECTV entries...
But countable.
Not if you exclude the ones who behave as if the rules apply to them.
Remember when they found literally a bag of cocaine in the White House last administration? I mean, how louder could one yell, "rules for thee"?
In the cubbies at the visitors’ entrance, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_White_House_cocaine_incid...
Cocaine in the White House would be be of the least concerning things that’s ever happened there in my view.
Found in storage cubby #50, an area where tour groups and visitors leave phones and personal belongings before entering secure or guided spaces.
This almost certainly had nothing to do with the administration. A single search would show that, for those interested in taking that time.
We're not allowed to say bad things about the _other_ guys. Bad things are only done by the current crop of inhabitants.
I like to be unipartisan (or is it panpartisan?), all politicians do bad things.
If it keeps happening I think that at least suggests the source is someone or some people who are “above the rules” most people would be bound by. You can tell the cleaning crew to get off the damned WiFi, others not so much.
Could even be cleaning or security.
As someone elsewhere in the thread noted, this could well be the press. Could also be that this isn’t the White House network at all despite that attribution.
Right, we know the White House owns that public IP, but this could be as bad as an unsecured, unmanaged device that is joined to a private network that is supposed to be secured, OR, on the “all the way good” side, that IP could be the exit for a completely throwaway, untrusted, isolated LAN segment meant only for some iOT device and which has no route to any other peer on the LAN side, and some civilian who has access to that for work brought in his laptop with a “free VPN!” Plugin and joined it to that network because it’s all he had credentials for.
The White House doesn't shut down at 5pm. There's whole books, TV series, and movies about the people that are working late every night at the White House. Likely dozens of people are on staff and work shifts that last until midnight every night of the week.
Service staff, including the storied hundred or so White House butlers, work whatever hours are needed. Then you have Secret Service, Kitchen staff, Natalie, house admin staff like the Chief Usher, maybe even NPS staff as the WH grounds are a national park as well, any of whom I would assume might be given access to unsecured WH wifi and likely a government-issued device. One device with a proxy among all of those people? Entirely unsurprising.
Maybe it's just the printer that Natalie carries around in her purse.
Even at midnight I can't imagine there being less than 100 people working at the WH in various capacities. While it's probably not the duty/desk officers in the Situation Room/Security Council, there are plenty of maintenance staff that work at night. 5-midnight seems like it overlaps perfectly with a shift schedule.
But how many of them would risk their job by smuggling in a device that violates government policies? Every device in the White House should be accounted for and meeting a number of security criteria. There are really only two or three people there who would know that those rules don't apply to them.
They are not saying that is _on purpose_, in fact they are saying the opposite: a compromised device, could be even an Android phone. It could also be as device planted on purpose, of course.
You’re misreading what this says. It’s someone bringing in a device they managed to get infected.
Oh and also the part where no one has caught this internally which is possibly the bigger takeaway. It’s a zero-trust network made out of incompetence.
There's nothing in the article that suggests it's not just the guest wifi. Which wouldn't be monitored. Why would you? The whole point is that it's segmented and can't actually interact with anything important.
Eh, I would not be surprised if they have a separate wifi that guests can use and you can hook up your private devices to. Basically every large company i have worked for, for the last two decades had that. I suspect deep in the bowels of the White House you don’t get good reception.
Why are you assuming the person knows and is actively smuggling in the device? And why would you then assume that person is more significant than a shift worker there?
Actually sound like the opposite of someone who lives there...Sounds like a shift worker.
Or the cleaning or security staff working the night shift.
If you regard 1,000 or less people as few, then this is true. If you regard 1,000 people as "too many" then you rate the national security of the USA at the cost of 1 in 1000 means it's not worth bothing to find out.
Is that really how national security works?
What makes you believe this is related to national security?
Do you imply this residential proxy is also a Presidential proxy?
Unless it is running on a government issued iPhone, it is not the Individual #1 you are alluding to.
He very famously does not know how to use computers and can only basically manage tweeting from his phone, which he is mostly not, actually, doing himself.
Now, there are two or three terminally online people around him. I would be more quick to point the finger at his foul-mouthed spokesman but it’s admittedly because I hate that guy and he seems rather stupid. But perhaps it could be the devoted portable printer lady, or the overpromoted unblinking former golf caddy guy.
All of them are around to help with the, er, modern day presidential communications.
> He very famously does not know how to use computers and can only basically manage tweeting from his phone, which he is mostly not, actually, doing himself.
Despite the constant negative press covfefe
There’s at least 500 people on just the staff of the White House, not including many others who work nearby.
With the authority to walk in with a streaming stick, plug it into a TV and connect to WiFi!
There’s a ton of people it could be. Any staffer that works 5-12, which wouldn’t be a particularly weird shift for cooks, cleaners, etc that bring their infected phone with them.
If it was someone who lived there it wouldn’t be exclusively that time period. Why wouldn’t it happen overnight or in the morning or any other time of day?
Yeah dude you’re right Trump bought an android tv from banggood and got pwned. You’re a genius.
He never buys what he can grift for free. Probably a gift from some autocrat in exchange for politcal favors. Much like the Great Seal bug.
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.
Compared to, russian intel scraping beyond demented word of mouth.
> The web is getting harder and harder to use due to all the anti-bot mechanisms site operators had to put up.
Indeed. I recently set up a bot on my local machine that I can interact with via Telegram. I gave it the ability to retrieve the contents of a URL via Playwright (with modifications). Basic things like getting the Readability view and getting the site as Markdown with links.
I was essentially mimicking the feature OpenAI etc offer where it can do a web search for you and get you the answer you seek. I just didn't want to pay a company for that feature.
It's not autonomous. It only acts when I tell it to. The actual search is via the Kagi API, but the URL contents is via Playwright. I also ensured it can't do lots of requests at a time. There's a mandatory (random) sleep of between 1 and 5 seconds between two requests.
In less than a week, I've been flagged. When I do a Google search (as a human), I have to prove I'm human. Many sites have simply blocked me - I can't buy stuff from various vendors[1], I cannot access several news sites, etc.
The thing is, I didn't really access that many sites with the bot! At most it's the equivalent of someone mildly addicted to the web. Yet they caught me quickly.
Obviously, I disabled the bot's capability to get site content. I wonder how long my IP will be in the blacklist.
I know some people will say "Good riddance" to the outcome and to what I did. I'd love to have a real, serious discussion on whether what I did was immoral. But whatever your thoughts on the matter, do ponder over the fact that the system has made it hard for average Joes like you and me to have this "feature", but if you pay a giant tech company a monthly fee, you can have it.
[1] Thankfully, Amazon didn't block me. In the past I'd avoid them, but now I'm in the dilemma where I don't want to buy stuff from sites that make it difficult for me to buy stuff from them!
Expect to remain blocked, that's how defense works, some services plenty use will have is bot or known proxy exit node set to true, and some websites use the same defense services, request velocity is just one factor, if you don't have random human like scrolling and jitter with a bot, it's a dead profile walking, metaphorically speaking
I don't think this is an immoral application at all from your description, but would that be clear on the receiving end?
Just restart your home router to rotate your IP address.
Doesn't work like that, only on mobile phones you can toggle airplane mode to get a new ip assigned and cgnat makes sure mobile ips are "trusted" , but they fingerprint you beyond ip address
That is entirely ISP dependent and many don't actually work like that. Your cable modem gets a specific IP for as long as Comcast or whoever sees fit, restarting does nothing on the WAN side.
True, I've had the same IPv4 address since 2018 on Spectrum despite rebooting at least 10 times.
> 100req/s
While your server handles that, what does your CPU do with the other 99% of available cycles?
I run https://bunnystomp.com on an Always Free VM from a major cloud provider. It handles 1,930 req/s at 33 ms latency with no tuning/optimization. It's literally just python behind cloudflare.
You seem to know a lot about my server. From what I could see, all cores were pinned to 100%, but maybe my budget AMD CPU is hiding fantastical amounts of compute from the kernel. I'd love to know how to make use of it.
I have no idea what the site you linked does, but it doesn't look like a cgit instance to me; that's what got hammered on my end, and when hosting it, one very quickly finds out that many git operations are CPU-bound.
If you want credibility from the get-go, you need to be up front about your application. I certainly took it to be a generic host for an unpopular site in your first comment.
I'll just note that "compromised" is perhaps too strong. These services often come from VPN plugins (eg Hola VPN) that lets users watch sports from different restricted geographic regions. There is a trade here that's in the TOs: you get someone else's IP address, they get yours.
Compromised describes exactly what you are talking about. Any free rider on a network that the operator is unaware of means the device is compromised.
If I'm using one of these services while connected to a guest wifi network, with the usual configuration for guest access (like no intranet connections), is that guest wifi network compromised? What's the threat model?
What part of that isn’t technically “compromised”? You can argue there’s no evidence of it currently being weaponized but I’d say some shitbird running a free vpn inside the White House is not a good look regardless.
We'd need a pedantic definition of "compromised" to be sure
Why wouldn't an adversary be using it to conceal command and control traffic?
> 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…
Not sure which direction you're intending this. The NSA is making special phones to protect politicians, or to make it easier to ensure they can read everything?
Por que no los dos?
It's always better to protect politicians from someone else
Politicians bringing phones isn’t a scif isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
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.
> There is no evidence that physically ties this to the WH.
They don't need to be physically inside a specific building to be a networking security problem.
The core issue is whether an outsider has bypassed your firewall and can send+receive traffic from a node which is getting more trust than it deserves. If they've compromised the computer's microphone/camera/wifi-control that's an additional problem.
"We don't know where the devices that appear to have breached the WH network are located. For all we know, they could be in Beijing or Moscow."
That seems significantly worse.
Perhaps ping time measurements could help identify where the devices are physically located.
If you were really sneaky, could you add some small jitter to the network responses to make it more difficult to locate?
You can only _add_ jitter. So presumably you make people think you're farther away than you really are. I guess if you're especially clever, you can manufacture responses to packets you haven't sent yet to throw people off.
Jitter is not a defense against statistical analysis. Additional lag might be what you want.
Additional constant delay? Isn't that also easily defeated when you're measuring from multiple nodes?
No. You would need to add hundreds of milliseconds depending on the sender's location.
Gotta have your SuperBox set up to watch 24 hr cable news working late into the night.
For those who don't know what this is, here's a decent podcast about it:
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/
There's a transcript if you want to read, not listen. At the start, you'll be "hey! I gotta get me one!" and later you'll be like "burn it with fire!"
Interesting! According to this, a lot more going on beyond the residential proxy element, which was the only bit I had considered (or heard about). I wish there was an accompanying article with some more specifics.
I aso would like a technical deepdive, the transcript comes out as not very well informed and borderline conspiratorial.
“ Most of the infected devices were manufactured in China. ” uh… most devices are manufactured in China period. Very strange article/podcast.
I have seen these at mall kiosks advertising "free cable", and today I learned they are proxying from your home network.
Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to run connected devices on my network that do run software I can reasonably trust. This is also why every computer, phone or appliance I own runs Linux. This includes my TV box, which I recently migrated to an x86 port of Android with Claude's help.
That is the least bad thing they could do btw. Unless your internet is data restricted, go for it if you want free cable. If questioned by your ISP (extremely unlikely but theoretically possible) pretend you have no idea what they're talking about.
Firewall it from your local network if you want to - it'll still work - they're not after that.
That was the first thing I thought of!
A friend in Texas claims they recently bought one at Wal-Mart. I don't know anything about how these work but that can't be true ... right?
It's absolutely true, these are sold all over the place
I was just thinking, what company's reviews could you trust the least than a residential proxy provider.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/myxproxy.com?languages=all
I have T-mobile 5g. My IP shows up as a residential proxy. I can't control the T-Mobile 5g device. It's a black-box. And, I only have one Linux desktop on the home network (so no Windows/Mac malware).
Not sure why my IP is listed as a residential proxy.
There’s only that many ipv4 addresses and I believe all 5G are shared ones. That’s why they’re among the most valuable ip ranges for scraping. You can’t just naively ban that IP or you’ll ban a large group of users
You certainly can ban that IP.
It should be a balancing act though, somewhere between what you said and my first sentence.
Rate limiting, or additional layers of input sanitisation for IP addresses known to have been malicious in the past.
It's unfortunate that good users will have to endure some difficulties because of bad users on the same network, but if security is the priority, then measures must be taken, you shouldn't just leave to door open to potentially known bad users / traffic.
IPv4 is a shared resource, but some ranges have worse reputations than others, and all are owned by organisations that have the ability to monitor and filter for malicious traffic. It gets into a fraught discussion about censorship, but it is possible for network owners to monitor for, and block / restrict traffic detected as 'bad'. It's just a matter of cost and scale, and those that put the effort in should have their users rewarded with fewer 'trust-issues' roadblocks.
> It's unfortunate that good users will have to endure some difficulties because of bad users on the same network, but if security is the priority, then measures must be taken, you shouldn't just leave to door open to potentially known bad users / traffic
Is this like a corporate support response? I legit can't tell. Try explaining to a retail consumer why they can't buy from your site because they have TMobile service.
They’re saying T-Mobile should be monitoring traffic on their network and block traffic from bad actors that ruin it for everyone for everyone else? Or at least they do in the next paragraph.
When the bad actor is grandma who has an infected computer, T-Mobile will be dealing with a lot of support calls from objectively non-malicious actors.
The blocking of residential proxies might be the thing that moves the world to ipv6. These days what we need is a dynamic map of all the IPs running proxies so servers can block them. If every device gets it's own v6 address, you could block just the TV running the proxy. Modern crowd sourced security products could identify the proxies and share their IP live so you can ban and unban addresses as the device moves.
Not sure about US but where I live I can manually set the access point of my phones mobile network and it gives me a unique ipv4 (new one each time in fact)
You might just be experiencing T-Mobile's CGNAT on mobile broadband?
You're almost certainly behind a cgnat shared with a bunch of compromised/residential proxy running phones and other traffic.
Or ones who are running it knowingly to make money. Can that even be called a compromise?
T-Mobile esp. their 5G network is behind CGNAT
Those are better than residential proxies. Those are White House proxies. I would pay $10/GB for those babies.
Those proxies are paid for in rubles, not dollars.
They are (p)residential proxies really
Executive residential proxies
Google just banned a chinese Android tv manufacturer for backdooring and installing malware on their devices. This I think is such a device someone pirate sports or porn streaming device.
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
If there's anything there, monitor your network to figure out exactly what
It lists VPN, Proxy, Tor, etc. Presumably a minus sign in a circle means you don't have the thing?
I had same confusion for a second but the html does clear it up: yes, it means you don't have the thing.
Freaky. They have a page explaining the concept (https://ipinfo.io/data/residential-proxy); when I checked it, there was a FOUC showing a full-screen, stretched image of what I think was Dario Amodei's face.
Neat. I almost said "surely this will only detect if your internet connection is itself being routed through a residential proxy", and then I realised that's effectively the same thing!
AFAIU that tells you if your access to ipinfo.io is thru a residential proxy, not if somebody else is using a residential proxy on your network.
It's effectively the same thing. If a residential proxy is running on your network, your IP will soon become known as a residential proxy exit.
It detects if your IP is a residential proxy, not if you are using a residential proxy. From the perspective of the outside Internet, they are the same thing, the only one who cares about the difference is you.
This one actually works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713037
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-...
… TIL such things exist. I assume it's networking so that it can grab photos to display from "the cloud" somewhere, and periodically change?
Yes. Smart frames often provide an endpoint where friends or family can send photos that will be automatically added to the rotation.
Great gifts! (At least for those unconcerned with privacy or security, which is most people.)
I suggest you just firewall it away from your important machines and then don't worry about it.
Watch egress at the router for anything unaccounted for, tbh.
I fear this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's the WH's own TOR node for any paying customer. It's manchurian candidate. It makes Clinton's emails look like ice cream.
This site is barely a year old. Where is the data and proof? What is the methodology?
vibe coded "black box" ie: probably shit.
Not all residential proxy providers are seedy - but I only know of one that isn't out of probably 20 or so major players so I guess fair call out on "infected".
It's incorporated into a lot of consumer devices legally. https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies
Brightdata still sucks at disclosing to users that they're opted in to this and that their connection is being used for this. It's "on by default", not opt-in and often buried in an unskippable "Accept the terms" or dig-to-opt-out prompt.
https://archive.ph/ado1H
Not sure why the text is all black, but it's there
I've never heard the term 'residential proxy' before, but it seems like a Tailscale exit node would qualify for example? This doesn't seem necessarily malicious or even inadvertently dangerous to me?
Residential IP addresses tend to have better reputations than datacenter networks, so there are providers who sell access to home internet connections. Oftentimes the people running the proxies have no idea they're running on their network, they're quasi malicious.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/goo...
Generally not really. Residential proxies are services that can provide customers with the ability to send and receive traffic from a wide range of apparently legitimate networks (i.e. people's home internet connections). Almost always this is done without the informed consent of the person who owns the device that is used as a proxy, whether it be buried in some agreement somewhere or just outright malware.
The biggest danger is that said proxies can also allow access to internal networks, and as you might guess from how they are installed, are not usually operated by the most scrupulous of organizations.
> whether it be buried in some agreement somewhere
is that actually a thing that was caught before?
It's pretty much exactly a Tailscale exit node, just one that somebody else installed without your knowledge or consent.
it’s a well known term in shady markets of the internet, they allow users and abusers to bypass bans and create multiple accounts that cannot be linked with each other by networking intel
And bypass restrictions that are keeping data paywalled as well.
And use stolen credit card numbers while appearing to originate from the real cardholder's area to avoid triggering fraud detection
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
There is also iphub.info and iphunter.info.
In my experience, out of the two, iphunter.info has the more comprehensive database, I think the owner/operator frequents HN.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone's is. Far as anyone can tell, it's probably AI companies.
It wasn't any sensible AI scraper. It kept requesting the same pages a thousand times over.
Yep that's what AI scrapers do
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'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.
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.
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.
That kind of VPN is considered a residential proxy.
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.
Some good answers in this thread. I had the same question but I'm still a tad confused:
* I initially thought this meant someone in the WH network was using commercial proxies to appear as if they were exiting from a different network (which would align with "some user is firing up a proxy on their phone to exit in a different location")
* But then the description of residential proxies seemed to align more with traffic hitting an endpoint in the White House, and _exiting_ from the network there. But this didn't explain the timing (why isn't it 24/7).
* Finally it sounds like some person, legitimately on the WH network, has a device (cell phone, TV, whatever) that, when activated, is proxying outside traffic into the WH network.
Brightdata offers it as a paid service https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies
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
They really should have said "botnet malware detected", it turns the White House into an exit IP for someone's else's botnet.
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.
Bad actors as defined by who. Why am I bad for not living in the right country to access a website.
Because the person whose IP you’re using as an exit node probably hasn’t fully consented to it being used as such.
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
Is the first word in that headline missing a P at the beginning?
It would be really great to have some info about how to detect such things locally.
Step 1: have you installed anything from an app store such as Google Play or Apple's app store?
Step 2: have you bought any devices made by large companies like LG or Samsung?
Domain is feeling the HN hug
5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) is 6:00 AM the next day in Beijing.
"Infected with a proxy SDK" wouldn't be my first guess. Am I jaded? A realist?
The biggest operator of residential proxy networks (BrightData) is based in Israel, which I'm sure has no connection to this at all...
Based. Can we turn every IP address that exists into a residential proxy, and then finally end this IP reputation stuff once and for all?
I'd still find a way to block your scrapers.
Such as what? I've tried to block scrapers on my website, and only the low effort ones are easy.
But … HER EMAILS!!
But her e-mail server!
Love me some buttery males
NSA honeypots
I would actually feel better if this were the case, but given that we have "the very best people" currently running our cybersecurity infrastructure I doubt it.
Most likely scenario is a 20-something holdover from DOGE who accidentally had his phone p0wned while downloading groyper memes.
Most likely scenario is a janitor who installed an app (I'm guessing it was called LegitWorldCupWatch420696969) on his phone (which might be connecting to the wifi network from whatever locker he leaves it in while he's on the clock, the WH is not a giant SCIF). Or any number of other mundane, easy to overlook employees who work outside of the actual secured areas of the building.
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.
Let's assume the worst, that it's a VIP. Ok, now let's do some basic frequency statistics:
If you click the AS2650 link (1) in the article, you will learn that AS2650 is announcing 65,792 addresses in 5 prefixes. Roughly 40-70% of the IP addresses in a typical corporate ASN are associated with actual computers humans are using. Let's go with 40%. You're looking at 26,317 people. Assume they're all adults (please, dear lord, let them all be adults). 3-8% of the workforce is in IT. Let's go with 3%, that's 789 people. I'm guessing one of those 789 folks has thought this through and has a few VLANs set up to keep VIP and family-of-VIP, pattern of life stuff in a box.
As for the thesis that these are all window-licking low-IQ goons, that's just not how the US government cultivates its workforce. It's no accident that Harvard Business School characterizes themselves as "the West Point of capitalism." West Point isn't someone else's anything. The US Government is in it for the long haul and captures folks young with impossible-to-resist opportunities like the military academies, ROTC, SMART scholars, etc. Let's just stick with the academies: 12,000 people a year who were likely competitive for the Ivies, Division 1 athletics, or both, but chose their parents poorly. Free, top tier education and a job is very attractive for kids from fly-over states. Hell, in big states like California, New York, and Texas, it can actually be even more competitive. Something north of 60% of those graduates stick around for at least 20 years of service (because the high three pension + VA benefits is a pretty nice floor for retirement when your options back home are line supervisor at the cotton mill, the sugar mill, the coal mine, or ramp manager for United), usually addicted to the crazy level of mission. Sort of the opposite of finance where people really struggle mentally if they're not making pallets of money at an accelerating rate. Government service pays dogshit, but the work can super interesting, especially as you gain seniority.
Those folks then often loop back into other agencies and do another 20 years. Are there goombas in the Government? Oh, for sure. Absolutely. But it's roughly the same fraction as any other workforce in the rest of the economy.
But by the time you get to top tier stuff like the White House staff, the sorting function has been strong. To make the point: you also see top tier folks in other organizations with government stink on them. I can think of at least two directors at Google who are prior military. A fat pile of McKinsey folks. Something like 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs have served in the military, above the national average (6-7% of Americans have served in the military at some point).
And it's hilarious to watch people simultaneously assert the government is a bunch of idiots, and then get all excited about fighter pilots, the CIA, the CDC, ambassadors, the NIH. As though those people just appeared from the head of Zeus fully formed. Where do you think they worked when they were young? They were stamping visas for the Department of State in some embassy in central Asia. They were rolling blankets and digging wells in Gambia for the Peace Corps. Checking corporate filings for mostly unknown companies at SEC. Studying aerospace engineering at Embry Riddle and then flying cleared checks between clearing houses across the state overnight in a Cessna.
(1) https://layer3intel.com/context/AS2650
... and then Donald Trump as President, Stephen Miller as, whatever he is, and Peter Hegseth as Defense Secretary (he did serve in the military, if that's worth anything).
probably something IOT with a vulnerability, happens all the time.
>that poorly secured proxy SDKs can allow internal network access and lateral movement.
Let me guess. The SDK being used does properly handle this and this whole article is anti residential proxy FUD.
Slop
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.
Vibe coders really having fun on their side quests these days
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.
There are providers who claim they are ethically sourced, and that users have consented. Although I guess many are users who don't know or care that it is happening.
Ethically, if someone just wants to play a free game and doesn't care about it, is it okay? How knowledgable does a user have to be in order to have informed consent?
> There are providers who claim they are ethically sourced, and that users have consented. Although I guess many are users who don't know or care that it is happening.
Betcha that means there was "consent" language on page 55 of some click-through EULA.
The landscape spans the gamut of everything from malware to explicit consent: https://packetstream.io/share-bandwidth/
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?
"Malware is an important part of the Internet
Technically correct statement though
Just like Tor, encryption, VPNs, etc, there are tons of legal uses for these proxies as well.
People who run Tor exit nodes generally do so by choice, and know the risks implications involved.
They didn't just connect a coffee pot to their WiFi one day.
Not all of these networks are built via malware.
e.g. https://packetstream.io/share-bandwidth/
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.
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”
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.
Hard disagree. They are malware 99.9% of the time. The utility does not erase the fact they are abusive.
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?
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.
Some of the more legit providers have KYC in place, and do literally require you to declare you intentions to open an account, and block certain traffic proactively unless you can prove a legitimate use.
How do I identify which residential proxies have gone through KYC and which are wanting to pour hot sauce in my under garments?
The ones that do KYC list it pretty prominently on their website.
They list the IP addresses of all the residential proxies? Is there a link to the netsets of all the IPv4 addresses they are using I can download once a day? (preferably over rsync but git over https is fine too)
I don't think even the most "ethical" providers are going to volunteer that information, since that defeats the entire purpose of having a residential proxy in the first place.
No...? That's a completely different question than what we were talking about above? The customers of a residential proxy who would be subject to KYC are the people using the addresses -- this has nothing to do with the exit addresses of those who have joined the network.
That's a completely different question than what we were talking about above?
In fairness to me, I did say "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."
So it could be Alice. I know Alice has good intentions. It could be Bob, we know what Bob is up to but I will give him a pass regardless because Bob did nice things in the past. But then there is Mallory ... Mallory Malfoid is up to no good. I need to know which IP's are used by Alice and Bob so I can exclude them from my automated protections. Mallory will automatically get rate limited to 16kb/s, 1 HTTP request every 5 seconds and if they bounce around different residential proxies they get redirected to a bathtub regardless of which residential proxy they use.
Yes, but KYC is a process where the service provider is making that determination. Either to a legal standard and/or their own standards.
In no world does "KYC" mean "expose your customer list to the whole world", let alone undermine the entire purpose of the product you're selling.
"I want to dox all of the customers of a proxy provider" is just an unreasonable ask. We wouldn't expect or want ISPs or VPNs or telecoms to do this.
In no world does "KYC" mean "expose your customer list to the whole world"
Agreed. Alice Rhodes, Bob Bojangle and Mallory Malfoid will all be treated equally.
This was a fun thread, I have always wanted to give them last names.
s/Residential proxies/DDoS networks/, then re-read your comment.
>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]?
You... Do know that people scrape websites for non-AI reasons, right?
Why should the site owners be interested in allowing them to do that?
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.