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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard the term 'residential proxy' before, but it seems like a Tailscale exit node would qualify for example? This doesn't seem necessarily malicious or even inadvertently dangerous to me?

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Residential IP addresses tend to have better reputations than datacenter networks, so there are providers who sell access to home internet connections. Oftentimes the people running the proxies have no idea they're running on their network, they're quasi malicious.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/goo...

"Quasi" malicious? What's quasi about it? It sounds completely malicious and fraudulent to do this without the knowledge of the network owner.

"Quasi" just because the intent isn't necessarily to cause harm to the local network itself.

Residential proxies are a scourge on the internet as a whole, but it's generally in their best interests to be transparent and unnoticeable to the places where they're hosted.

There is a semi-valid use case in that proxying your network usage through arbitrary hops is valid for anonymization and privacy.

Things like Apple Cloud relay and other corporate VPN services do make it more difficult for the services my company purchases to find your identity and track you. We are trying to find out how we can continue to prevent credit card fraud while supporting customers to continue using such services to protect their data and privacy.

Literally everything else is malicious though. The purpose is literally just a botnet. The point is to be able to get arbitrary packets stamped with arbitrary and diverse IP addresses to prevent IP address filtering and tracking from being able to block malicious activity.

It's ban evasion.

It's pretty much exactly a Tailscale exit node, just one that somebody else installed without your knowledge or consent.

Generally not really. Residential proxies are services that can provide customers with the ability to send and receive traffic from a wide range of apparently legitimate networks (i.e. people's home internet connections). Almost always this is done without the informed consent of the person who owns the device that is used as a proxy, whether it be buried in some agreement somewhere or just outright malware.

The biggest danger is that said proxies can also allow access to internal networks, and as you might guess from how they are installed, are not usually operated by the most scrupulous of organizations.

> whether it be buried in some agreement somewhere

is that actually a thing that was caught before?

Yes, some of these companies offer libraries to turn your mobile app into an exit node and get paid for the traffic. You can find news about Google Play playing whac-a-mole against apps doing so silently, often involving law enforcement as well.

Also some free VPNs use their users as exit nodes for their actual paying customers, good luck finding a user who understands that. It's the obvious way to monetize such a service other than ads.

it’s a well known term in shady markets of the internet, they allow users and abusers to bypass bans and create multiple accounts that cannot be linked with each other by networking intel

And bypass restrictions that are keeping data paywalled as well.

And use stolen credit card numbers while appearing to originate from the real cardholder's area to avoid triggering fraud detection

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