alt Hacker NewsUS residential proxies are the bane of the internet. They're the major source of social media manipulation and spam.
Services can dramatically reduce abuse by blocking entire IP ranges based on country of origin, organization, or type (hosting providers). But a company can't block US residential IPs if it would also cut off many of their real customers.
The US government (probably the NSA) should be cracking down hard on US residential proxy networks. They're a genuine national security threat, actual data/identity loss of American citizens, act as infra for foreign covert influence campaigns, botnets used in hacking/DoS attacks, etc.
Major US ISPs (Comcast, AT&T) should detect clearly suspicious activity coming from customer IPs and warn them to scan their computers, check their TV apps, and find whatever is turning their internet into a proxy. It's very bad for the customers too (slows things down, gets their IP banned, etc)
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> Major US ISPs (Comcast, AT&T) should detect clearly suspicious activity coming from customer IPs and warn them to scan their computers, check their TV apps, and find whatever is turning their internet into a proxy. It's very bad for the customers too (slows things down, gets their IP banned, etc)
Is there incentive for them to? If anything, you might be paying extra for the data use and not even know it, right? They would lose money
I'm glad someone else is saying this. Entire companies exist (that do a great job at it) that primarily surface this information in the form of "threat intelligence" for companies to make risk decisions based off of.
A crackdown would probably be an FBI responsibility, the NSA is not a law enforcement agency and absolutely does not have the authority.
My major sources of spam traffic are Chinese and Indian residential and mobile IP blocks. So there's that.
Second, everybody screamed loudly when they were cracking down on file sharing traffic. You're saying spying on the citizens is ok when it's for this little reason over here, but not this one over there. It doesn't track.
Not to mention most ISP abuse mailboxes are automated these days because they are flooded with LLM-generated reports from "security" grifters.
The tech industry flooding the market with countless IoS (Internet of Shit) devices didn't help. This has moved way beyond accidentally installing spyware on your PC. People are intentionally bugging their homes with these devices.
I understand the FCC is trying to crack down on this stuff - starting with routers - but of course that gets pushback too. You can't win.
> Major US ISPs (Comcast, AT&T) should detect clearly suspicious activity coming from customer IPs and warn them to scan their computers, check their TV apps, and find whatever is turning their internet into a proxy. It's very bad for the customers too (slows things down, gets their IP banned, etc)
Does having TLS everywhere make this much harder?