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I quite recently learnt about “Residential proxies”, for a scraping idea I had. Seems like that can be useful for attacks like this. It’s surprisingly cheap to

I quite recently learnt about “Residential proxies”, for a scraping idea I had. Seems like that can be useful for attacks like this. It’s surprisingly cheap to get access to services which fan out your requests over millions of normal residential IPs, making them (I assume) hard to block. Of course their use can be highly objectionable, as well as how they got the proxies installed in homes of people in the first place (semi-malware?) E.g https://oxylabs.io/pricing/residential-proxy-pool https://oxylabs.io/pricing/residential-proxy-pool

CPLX 7y ago
This page was amusing to me: https://oxylabs.io/solutions/ad-verification https://oxylabs.io/solutions/ad-verification This is a euphemism right? Like what they're really saying is that this service would make it possible to fake ad traffic right?
- 55555 7y ago
  lol... The first sentence below definitely doesn't belong. The second outlines the legitimate use case. > Hackers and fraudsters use various schemes to fake ad traffic and, as a result, a vast number of ads are never seen by real people. Therefore, more and more companies use proxies to detect fraud, improve ad performance, and check advertisers’ landing pages anonymously.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    Is there actually a legit use though? Like what's the use case for needing a million residential proxy IP's to legitimately test and evaluate advertising?
sbarre 7y ago
This has to be provided by a botnet or some other malware, right? They claim 30M residential IP addresses.. How would this be done otherwise? There's no info on the site about "signing up" to be a proxy, just about using them..
- filleokus 7y ago
  There are several of these providers, and the only one I noticed saying how they acquired the IP's was Luminati [0]. I didn't look too carefully on all of them though. > When these application vendors integrate the Luminati SDK, their users are offered the alternative to not watch these video ads in return for opting in to the Luminati network. https://luminati.io/faq#lum-peers-join https://luminati.io/faq#lum-peers-join.
- rdrey 7y ago
  I believe "Hola VPN" did something similar as a browser extension. (You join our free VPN, you act as a node in our commercial residential IP pool (botnet).)

CPLX 7y ago

This page was amusing to me: https://oxylabs.io/solutions/ad-verification https://oxylabs.io/solutions/ad-verification This is a euphemism right? Like what they're really saying is that this service would make it possible to fake ad traffic right?

55555 7y ago
lol... The first sentence below definitely doesn't belong. The second outlines the legitimate use case. > Hackers and fraudsters use various schemes to fake ad traffic and, as a result, a vast number of ads are never seen by real people. Therefore, more and more companies use proxies to detect fraud, improve ad performance, and check advertisers’ landing pages anonymously.
- CPLX 7y ago
  Is there actually a legit use though? Like what's the use case for needing a million residential proxy IP's to legitimately test and evaluate advertising?

sbarre 7y ago

This has to be provided by a botnet or some other malware, right? They claim 30M residential IP addresses.. How would this be done otherwise? There's no info on the site about "signing up" to be a proxy, just about using them..

filleokus 7y ago
There are several of these providers, and the only one I noticed saying how they acquired the IP's was Luminati [0]. I didn't look too carefully on all of them though. > When these application vendors integrate the Luminati SDK, their users are offered the alternative to not watch these video ads in return for opting in to the Luminati network. https://luminati.io/faq#lum-peers-join https://luminati.io/faq#lum-peers-join.
rdrey 7y ago
I believe "Hola VPN" did something similar as a browser extension. (You join our free VPN, you act as a node in our commercial residential IP pool (botnet).)