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Beware: Hola VPN turns your PC into an exit node and sells your traffic
Hola VPN turns any device it is run on in an exit node which anyone may purchase access to.
Hola uses a sophisticated system to offer its services for free. Instead of routing users solely (or at all) through company servers and raking up huge bandwidth bills in the process, it is utilizing user devices as endpoints.
This means basically that any user device that Hola is running on acts as an endpoint. An endpoint is a node that is communicating directly with a target website or service that Hola users access when the service is enabled.
I've read a few articles about this in swedish but here is one in english.
English article: http://www.ghacks.net/2015/05/28/beware-hola-vpn-turns-your-pc-into-an-exit-node-and-sells-your-traffic/
If you are a Hola user, make sure you are protected.
Comments
I always thought this was common knowledge?
Obviously not. ......
Tbh isnt no good to share our IPs among all users, so I dont see an use for such service. People should indeed be aware.
another source http://torrentfreak.com/hola-vpn-sells-users-bandwidth-150528/
Just ask the question,
What company would have 1,000's of servers all over the world to host your traffic?
How is that company going to make money? Even with LEBoxes it would be a crazy high cost to provide those connections.
may also be worth knowing it appears to be a "israeli" company.
The only time I use Hola is when I'm buying games from Nuuvem.
i'm just curious, how to make sure that our internal network can't use that services, is it enough for blocking the hola networks? thanks
and how do you intend to block it?
I am surprised it did take so long for it to hit the fan, since they were already using their users as exits even if not selling bandwidth, which is just incredible.
https://support.cipafilter.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/158/27/hola---how-to-block
What a massive botnet... so many IP's
It's not a botnet per-se, it's just a p2p network but the maintainer of the network makes a lot of money from the peers on the network.
puppetnet
The fact that it's a P2P VPN network has always been pretty clear (it's right on their front page and in their FAQ). I'm OK with that; it's the whole reason Hola works so much better than any other free VPN.
The commercial use, though, wasn't clearly disclosed until now and I'm not thrilled at all to learn about that.
found this in faq:
I use Hola, but I decided to have a bit of fun, turning it into a MITM attack, monitoring all incoming/outgoing traffic.
The way I see it, might as well have a bit of fun before I remove it. Might even inject advertisements for fun.
Fun thing is that it even keeps your computer infected when you remove the VPN
If you ever used a VPN/proxy, please clear your cache.
Well, you're violating the terms of service:
They should definitely be more clear about this though. I imagine this has caused some people to have issues with their ISP by this point?
@perennate well they're violating my right to privacy, so it's fair.
they are not violating your rights..
it is explicitly stated that if you are not using their premium service then your idle resources will be used. You agreed to their terms when you started using their product?
Meh, going to do it anyways.
No they're not. You can use their paid service if you don't want this 'free' thing that you have to agree to.
Or I could just block them for using my network, and still piggyback off of others.
let's keep the antisemitism out of LET, shell we? Great companies have come out of there. Probably because the country values its software engineers (contrary to most EU countries, where software engineers are paid on par with truck drivers, no offence to truck drivers).
He didn't say anything anti-semitic. He may be implying that a certain organisation may be behind it. Wouldn't surprise me, good fly paper.
Reminds me of....
You're so anti-Semitic, it's just pathetic at this point. What does being an Israeli company have anything to do with the service it offers?
Would you trust operating system maintained by some "company" in North Korea? Everyone has some bias against some political entities, for example I wouldn't rely on any anonymous email service in the U.S.
Israel and North Korea are two completely different cases.
Maybe to you, but not completely different to everyone. Also edited my post above (added another sentence).
Here's another example, I'm much more careful with sharing my personal data with Russian company than with U.S. company.