Residential Proxy | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Security teams have never had more IP data at their disposal. Every day, analysts ingest enrichment feeds, geolocation data, reputation scores, telemetry, and threat intelligence from a growing ecosystem of vendors and platforms. Yet despite this abundance of information, many organizations continue to face a fundamental challenge: sifting through the noise to understand who is behind an IP and what action should follow . Case in point: a recent industry study of more than 200 security practitioners conducted by Spur Intelligence found that anonymizing infrastructure - including VPNs and residential proxy networks - now appears in nearly every security incident. At the same time, the study showed that many organizations admit they lack the visibility, context, and operational workflows needed to make effective decisions based on that IP data. The findings support a broader industry trend: a reactive approach to managing IP-based risks. The Rise of Anonymized Infrastructure...

A researcher has reverse-engineered the iOS SDK that Bright Data embeds in consumer apps and documented how, with the user's consent, it can turn devices, including always-on smart TVs, into exit nodes that relay web-scraping traffic for a data business Bright Data markets heavily to the AI industry. The company, the successor to Luminati, operates what it calls the largest residential proxy network in the world, advertised at more than 400 million residential IPs. Part of that supply comes from this SDK, shipped inside free apps behind an opt-in screen and described by Bright Data as a consent-sourced pool of 150 million-plus IPs. The findings, published June 5 by  Include Security  and independent researcher Buchodi, matter because the scraping comes from the user's home IP, not the customer's. The immediate risk is not a hacked account or stolen data; it is that a home connection and its bandwidth get used as someone else's scraping infrastructure. A connec...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new botnet loader called Aeternum C2 that uses a blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to make it resilient to takedown efforts. "Instead of relying on traditional servers or domains for command-and-control, Aeternum stores its instructions on the public Polygon blockchain," Qrator Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This network is widely used by decentralized applications, including Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market. This approach makes Aeternum's C2 infrastructure effectively permanent and resistant to traditional takedown methods." This is not the first time botnets have been found relying on blockchain for C2. In 2021, Google said it took steps to disrupt a botnet known as Glupteba that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a backup C2 mechanism to fetch the actual C2 server address. Details of Aeternum C2 first emerged in December 2025, when Outpos...

The malware known as Ngioweb has been used to fuel a notorious residential proxy service called NSOCKS, as well as by other services such as VN5Socks and Shopsocks5, new findings from Lumen Technologies reveal. "At least 80% of NSOCKS bots in our telemetry originate from the Ngioweb botnet, mainly utilizing small office/home office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices," the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Two-thirds of these proxies are based in the U.S." "The network maintains a daily average of roughly 35,000 working bots, with 40% remaining active for a month or longer." Ngioweb, first documented by Check Point way back in August 2018 in connection with a Ramnit trojan campaign that distributed the malware, has been the subject of extensive analyses in recent weeks by LevelBlue and Trend Micro , the latter of which is tracking the financially motivated threat actor behind the operation as Wate...