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What’s really behind residential proxy providers?
whiterider
Member
in General
I’ve been reading about residential proxy seervices and I’m trying to understand how they’re actually sourced and why are people keep using them,
Are most of these networks built from opt in users sharing their connections or is there a significant portion coming from compromised devices?
Finally, what are the most common legitimate use cases people here have seen for residential proxies beyond scraping?
Curious to hear from anyone with real world experience on both the provider and customer side.
Comments
@sillycat
From me; I don't have real world experience, but residential proxies seem to either be hacked devices (botnets) or people willingly installing some "traffic monetizer" type of apps.
Or a "free VPN" turning your device into an exit node for others (which i guess counts as hacked). Most popular example of such would likely be Hola which did that some 10 years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32958624
https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/misadventures-with-hola-service-or-a-lot-of-strings-attached/4048/
AFAIK and correct me if I'm wrong
Much more usage for illegitimate use.
In "the space" you have the bigger providers, such as Oxylabs and IPRoyal. These pools are made out of a combination of legitimate users trying to make some extra money, and apps trying to make some extra money by selling the users bandwidth. There are also threat actors selling botnet devices connections using the same method as the apps.
Then you have all the smaller providers. Majority of these providers are resellers of Oxylabs and IPRoyal, but there are also some with their own pools. These pools are majority botnet devices, as how else can a small provider find users to install their software?
The only legitimate use is scraping. Everything else is relating to it (i.e. crawling).
We sell those to multiple proxy companies.
It's basically servers in data center, IP ranges routed over ISP ASN. Works as good as your native broadband/mobile data.
There are some secrets that makes our proxies better than what you could buy from the companies that are not using our services.
Edit: Our setup is better than IPRoyal. Already tested myself.
https://hostcram.com/proxy
Thank you for the reply, someone would need to be crazy to opt in for this willingly. Region block bypass yes, never thought of that!
Not really a "legitimate" use case, but I can imagine the scenario someone from a "restricted" country registering to a service using residential proxy (while the service is blocking datacenter/VPN IPs) with no malicious intent.
Think MJJs registering for services not accessible in China. That's still not really legitimate and likely bypasses the ToS of service provider tho.
Yeah the entire conversation is outside the "legitimate" perspective
Very insiteful thank you for sharing your knowledge!
Tbh based on my experience there is not many legitimate use case for that though. They're being used mostly for cyber crime. And a good residential proxy provider charge you arm and leg for that.
Woudln't that be consider a datacenter proxy service? Datacenter proxies is an easier product line to understand, residential proxies on the other hand in my mind can be only aquired by making someone part of a botnet and then using their network, which is very very bad.
So residential proxies should be clasified generaly speaking as cyber crime enablers since the hosts are obtained maliciously and the end customer also uses them in a malicious way.
Depends what you malicious. Is getting around ratelimits malicious? Is getting around captchas malicious?
Most legitimate pools block websites that are obvious criminal activity, such as all banks, *.gov, etc.
No you have no idea then.
It will only be marked as data center proxy if the ASN is data center/Business/Hosting ASN.
If we announce IP range for an example over AS6079 Astound Broadband, it will show up as ISP. We can just do it better than other providers.
I could send you one IP from IPRoyal and one from our setup to compare. Both works perfectly fine but real human and some whois can identify IPRoyal residential proxy as proxy/network sharing device while ours will show up as native ISP on all whois/db and even real humans can't confidently say it's proxy.
It violates service own policies, so I think it is. They have some protection layer, and someone bypasses it.
Would be curious to get one of your IPs. I've seen IPRoyal hijack IP ranges recently (massive /12, /14, /15, /16) and announcing them on residential ASNs. The IPs are also owned by residential ISPs, just not used.
I honestly doubt you could top that level of insaneness.
Okay I mean I am here to learn, so why a residential AS operator allow someone to do that? Wouldn't that hurt his IP reputation? Then in the long run customer trust etc.
I mean pre-blocking the domains is something in terms of protecting some key targets and captchas are just super annoying for everyone. But from my understanding there may be few users that use them "legitimately" but most often it falls into the hands of bad guys.
As always, money. It's mostly offered as some type of BYOIP service for datacenter customers, but companies like Rackdog sell it to proxy companies.
AT&T used to also offer such services, but discontinued it due to the abuse going on on their ASN.
TorGuard also offers a residential IP service. From what I understand, they're using IP's from ISP's attached to a server. I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it works, but it's intriguing.
I can't think of anything I really need it for, but it's not too expensive, currently $19.80/year here:
https://torguard.net/vpn-promo/
That sale seems to be perpetual, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if the IP is shared or dedicated at that price. If anybody's used it, I'd be curious to know how it is.
We just announce our own ranges through renting etc. No hijacking happening with us.
Money, money and huge amounts of money.
And no. It wouldn't hurt them. Wouldn't even make tiny bit of difference as long as the proxies aren't being used for something like DDoS or hacking attempts.
You nailed it
Hard question is how to distinguish botnet operated residential proxy networks compared to what you described.
I don't use such a service, but for instance, I would say that using such a service to save money on something like Netflix is legitimate. Their terms might argue otherwise, but that's because they're just trying to price gouge every region to the maximum people will pay there. If they don't know you're not from where your IP says and they're still prepared to sell you a service, then that's on them and they'll still be making money from that sale.
It's easier to spot ISP proxies than residential ones. If the IPs aren't under the ISPs LIR account, that's a big red flag.
Curious how ipinfo.io define your residential ips?
Below's a mix of what I've found + info from sneaker twitter when it was a thing.
Generally, most of the bigger providers (Brightdata, Oxylabs, Netnut, IPOasis, etc) that request you to provide a rationale + some level of identification to use their residential proxies will try to source their proxy hosts via legitimate methods like having their SDK in apps and burying "we will use your connection" in the T&Cs, or pay you for your bandwidth.
Then you have resellers for those companies who take on the risk of what you do with the proxies and charge you a slightly inflated rate, but allow you to buy smaller packages of data.
Then there are the providers that are dirt cheap (<$1 per GB) which use hacked devices or botnets like Aisuru / Kimwolf for their traffic.
synthient (not affiliated) seems to have a good tool to search up providers and where the proxy company's IPs come from
I personally use residential proxies for bypassing geoblocks (probably not legal) and scraping. Because a lot of the proxies I have charge by the GB, it's not really worth it for me to use it on streaming.
From my experience, it's the exact opposite. They charge significantly less than mainstream providers for the same amount of data because they purchase in bulk and therefore get volume discounts.
That is a really good question indeed, classification + keeping it up to date would be hard but they must have figured out a solid way to impliment this.
So "legit" operators are less expensive than botnet operated networks?
No. What I'm saying is that proxy resellers offer the proxy pools of legit providers for cheaper because they purchase in bulk from these legit providers, so they can resell for cheaper.
Generally, shadier pools are cheaper. Brightdata at 4/g, 711proxy (shady, but not 100% shady) at 1.2/g and Kimwolf sells at 0.8/g.