Hola VPN, our favorite VPN service to hate, is at it again. In the evening of 9 July 2018, MyEtherWallet (MEW) announced that a Hola hack has potentially jeopardized the crypto wallets of all who used Hola‘s Chrome extension over a period of 5 hours. MEW suggested that compromised users should immediately transfer their money to a different wallet (if they still could). It isn‘t yet clear how much money was lost due to this attack, but that‘s really beside the point…
In 2015 it came to light that Hola VPN had been selling off its users’ bandwidth to a sister company – Luminati. Virtual Private Networks are expensive to run, particularly in terms of infrastructure. Hola tries to solve the issue of costliness by having users’ PCs route traffic through them, using that bandwidth in the process. This would supposedly only happen when the computers are idle, plugged into a power source, not using mobile data, etc. So far so good, but what happens when your IP gets caught up in something illegal? Case in point: Luminati sells bandwidth for large-scale data transfers – Hola users’ bandwidth to be precise. Well, on at least one occasion that bandwidth was used as part of a botnet to carry out a DDoS attack on 8chan (8ch.net) – oops!
What’s Hola done now?
So now several years have passed and here we are, bashing Hola VPN once again. Even though this case doesn’t seem to be as malicious as the last, the consequences are still quite terrible.
MyEtherWallet is a popular cryptocurrency management service. It allows users to access wallets as well as make transactions. It is important to be quite clear here – MyEtherWallet was not hacked. What happened was hackers used currently-unclear means to hijack Hola VPN and log users’ activity on MyEtherWallet. This means they could have potentially hijacked login credentials needed to access your wallet and make crypto transactions.
Source and more.
What do you think about this whole mess?
In 2015 it came to light that Hola VPN had been selling off its users’ bandwidth to a sister company – Luminati. Virtual Private Networks are expensive to run, particularly in terms of infrastructure. Hola tries to solve the issue of costliness by having users’ PCs route traffic through them, using that bandwidth in the process. This would supposedly only happen when the computers are idle, plugged into a power source, not using mobile data, etc. So far so good, but what happens when your IP gets caught up in something illegal? Case in point: Luminati sells bandwidth for large-scale data transfers – Hola users’ bandwidth to be precise. Well, on at least one occasion that bandwidth was used as part of a botnet to carry out a DDoS attack on 8chan (8ch.net) – oops!
What’s Hola done now?
So now several years have passed and here we are, bashing Hola VPN once again. Even though this case doesn’t seem to be as malicious as the last, the consequences are still quite terrible.
MyEtherWallet is a popular cryptocurrency management service. It allows users to access wallets as well as make transactions. It is important to be quite clear here – MyEtherWallet was not hacked. What happened was hackers used currently-unclear means to hijack Hola VPN and log users’ activity on MyEtherWallet. This means they could have potentially hijacked login credentials needed to access your wallet and make crypto transactions.
Source and more.
What do you think about this whole mess?
