alt Hacker NewsThe 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…
Replies
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.
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…
> 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?