> 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?

> 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…

Why are you commenting so pretend ambivalent about the fact that the US government is being spied on?

> 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.

Perhaps ping time measurements could help identify where the devices are physically located.

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!"

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!

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 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.

Those proxies are paid for in rubles, not dollars.

Executive residential proxies

Scroll down to "anonymization": https://ipinfo.io/what-is-my-ip

If there's anything there, monitor your network to figure out exactly what

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.

Watch egress at the router for anything unaccounted for, tbh.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Love me some buttery males

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-...

> 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?

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?

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

Hard disagree. They are malware 99.9% of the time. The utility does not erase the fact they are abusive.

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?

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.

>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.