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.
How is DDOSing every site on the web benign?
A compromised device inside the White House network could presumably be doing something _much_ worse than participating in a DDOS against random websites.
If something is on their network, they know about it. They have a bigger budget and more bodies to throw at the problem than you want to believe.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-st...
Perhaps some of them annoyed the President's illegally-appointed mega-donor, if they spoke out against giving root access to all his unvetted junior flunkies.
Or let me sum it up for you. The government doesn't have the money to employ top security experts and top security experts don't actually want to work for the government.
It’s not just the pay, there’s a lot of structural elements that mean that the potential talent pool is less than desired.
I mean politicians are so addicted to twitter the nsa makes special phones…
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.
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.
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!"
Not sure why my IP is listed as a residential proxy.
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.
If there's anything there, monitor your network to figure out exactly what
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<span class="text-sm">Residential Proxy</span>
<span class="sr-only">Not detected</span>
</li>I was aghast when my partner connected a pet watering bowl to the WiFi.
https://support.frameo.com/hc/en-us/articles/23433637149842-...
Beyond that gross metric you're getting into capturing traffic and decoding it.
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.
Such as ignoring web scraping countermeasures, and DDoS.
* 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.
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.
+ Sketchy Apps
+ Malware
+ Weird Android Variants
> Residential proxy services sell access to everyday devices, letting customers send traffic through them so it appears to come from that device's network.
https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/what-can-we-...
Let me guess. The SDK being used does properly handle this and this whole article is anti residential proxy FUD.
I buy and use residential proxies, though.
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.
Aren't they almost always run unknowingly, by people tricked into running them?
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?
Betcha that means there was "consent" language on page 55 of some click-through EULA.
Help me understand. As far as I'm aware, these residential proxies are almost always malware.
> 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?
Technically correct statement though
They didn't just connect a coffee pot to their WiFi one day.
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.
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.
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?