Hola VPN Used as Botnet-for-Hire Service, Comes with Bugs Galore

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Jack

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Jan 24, 2011
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A recent post from the owner of anonymous image board 8Chan about abusing the free Hola VPN service for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) purposes determined researchers to take an in-depth look at the platform, revealing much more serious risks looming on the users.

Hola VPN functions as a peer-to-peer service, meaning someone who wants to access a resource that is restricted in their region routes the connection through the computers (at idle time) of users who have access to the content.

Every free Hola user is an endpoint for paying clients
The model adopted allows the service to be free, because there is no proxy infrastructure maintained by the company, and users’ systems act as exit nodes for the connections, something that has been in the license agreement.

Hola is easy-to-use and works by installing a browser extension, which can be turned on or off and allows choosing the country the connection should be routed through. At the moment, the network touts 47 million users around the world, making it probably one of the largest VPN services.

However, some revenue needs to be generated to pay for improving the service, and this is not obtained through advertising, but via the Luminati VPN, the commercial brand of the consumer peer-to-peer VPN network.

Simply put, anyone in the Luminati network can run traffic through the computers of free Hola VPN users, which are viewed as the originators of the connection and could suffer legal consequences if malicious activity is carried out by the paying customers.

Read more: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Hola...e-Service-Comes-with-Bugs-Galore-482904.shtml
 
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