Posted by Rasbora 16 hours ago
This also puts some of the troubling reports that politicians were bringing phones into SCIFs into context…
On a server that used to get below 1k HTTP requests a day, I've had several cases of mass scraping from these botnets exceeding 100req/s. The web is getting harder and harder to use due to all the anti-bot mechanisms site operators had to put up.
How is DDOSing every site on the web benign?
A compromised device inside the White House network could presumably be doing something _much_ worse than participating in a DDOS against random websites.
> One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.
Surely a Russian company known for cyberattacks against the US having direct access to the White House network is far more serious than just DDOSing random websites. This is espionage at the highest level. (Again.)
A whitehouse network. It isn't like everything done in that building run through a single wifi router. It is likely an unprotected network for personal use with zero connecting to anything important.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-st...
Perhaps some of them annoyed the President's illegally-appointed mega-donor, if they spoke out against giving root access to all his unvetted junior flunkies.
They are young and think they are very smart. What could go wrong?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
> Berulis alleged in the affidavit that there attempted logins to NLRB systems from an IP address in Russia in the days after DOGE accessed the systems. He told Reuters Tuesday that the attempted logins apparently included correct username and password combinations but were rejected by location-related conditional access policies.
* https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/whistleblow...
* https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
You have one alleged example.
That sounds like being deliberately obtuse and arguing in bad-faith. Are you going to "nuh uh" all the journalists and lawyers until you are personally given raw TCP dumps?
Behold, from the sworn affidavit of the DevSecOps guy with the top-secret clearance, as included in a whistleblower disclosure to Congress [0]:
> There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.
So there it is, now don't go moving the goalposts.
[0] https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...
Or let me sum it up for you. The government doesn't have the money to employ top security experts and top security experts don't actually want to work for the government.
In fact avoiding therapy at all costs is a good sign of trouble.
To be fair, they had quite a number of security experts on payroll before the current administration laid them all off...
It’s not just the pay, there’s a lot of structural elements that mean that the potential talent pool is less than desired.
What are you doing to make this true?
I'm a screen reader user (which is as "weird and unusual" as it gets when fingerprinting mechanisms are concerned), and I am not really noticing much difference versus 2022 or so. Sure, there's little bits of anubis here or there, and a few sites (which I know for a fact are experiencing targeted DDoS attacks unrelated to AI scraping) having annoying Cloudflare verification screens, but that's about it.
My setup (other than the screen reader) is as vanilla as it gets. Safari, AdGuard for Ad blocking, no VPN except work VPN when necessary, no PiHole, no settings changed. If you're using something more esoteric, maybe try going mainstream and see if that improves your experience.
In comparison I get cloudflare recaptcha on every site that uses it, sometimes multiple times per session and sometimes not even letting me pass at all due to "error".
And if the website uses Google recaptcha then I close the tab because I know it will just end up in endless recaptcha hell.
It’s DRM that I think of as silly larping that doesn’t really bother me, but it’s clearly drm.
2) They're clearly talking from the perspective of the user and network admin. A residential proxy virus is in fact quite benign for both.
3) No matter what, DoS is quite a low priority in terms of security. And it's not even really DDoS, you'll know a real DDoS when you're on the receiving end.
That's only because it isn't being prosecuted appropriately.
I'm all for creating consequences for people who negligently don't secure their systems and people get hurt because of it, but people who installed a mobile game that has a proxy library in it? Please, chill.
Indeed. I recently set up a bot on my local machine that I can interact with via Telegram. I gave it the ability to retrieve the contents of a URL via Playwright (with modifications). Basic things like getting the Readability view and getting the site as Markdown with links.
I was essentially mimicking the feature OpenAI etc offer where it can do a web search for you and get you the answer you seek. I just didn't want to pay a company for that feature.
It's not autonomous. It only acts when I tell it to. The actual search is via the Kagi API, but the URL contents is via Playwright. I also ensured it can't do lots of requests at a time. There's a mandatory (random) sleep of between 1 and 5 seconds between two requests.
In less than a week, I've been flagged. When I do a Google search (as a human), I have to prove I'm human. Many sites have simply blocked me - I can't buy stuff from various vendors[1], I cannot access several news sites, etc.
The thing is, I didn't really access that many sites with the bot! At most it's the equivalent of someone mildly addicted to the web. Yet they caught me quickly.
Obviously, I disabled the bot's capability to get site content. I wonder how long my IP will be in the blacklist.
I know some people will say "Good riddance" to the outcome and to what I did. I'd love to have a real, serious discussion on whether what I did was immoral. But whatever your thoughts on the matter, do ponder over the fact that the system has made it hard for average Joes like you and me to have this "feature", but if you pay a giant tech company a monthly fee, you can have it.
[1] Thankfully, Amazon didn't block me. In the past I'd avoid them, but now I'm in the dilemma where I don't want to buy stuff from sites that make it difficult for me to buy stuff from them!
I normally use a VPN to access the Internet. It's an ordinary consumer-grade VPN, and I use it for pretty innocuous things like watching the international versions of Netflix or avoiding being geographically-profiled and charged more when I book travel. The VPN itself, I'm sure, is being used for all sorts of naughty stuff: when I look it up in whatismyip, it comes up as VPN, "abuse detected", and "residential proxy detected". I expect to get blocked occasionally on it and just pause the VPN then.
What I found surprising is that pausing the VPN doesn't always clear the CAPTCHAs. The next request will also fail, sometimes. For a while I was wondering if I have a residential proxy on my network, but I went hunting with lsof and bandwidth monitoring and a list of all the open connections through my router, and it seems clear. Yet even with VPN disabled, I'll get CAPTCHAs from Google and Cloudflare.
I suspect they're using browser/TLS fingerprinting and then smearing the results of that across bad IPs. If you connect to them through a known-bad IP, they not only will CAPTCHA you, but they will record a fingerprint of any data they can. Then if you connect again with that fingerprint, regardless of the IP, they block that too.
Ironically, if you are actually malicious, you can get around this pretty easily. Because you'll know not to use a fingerprintable browser, or to rotate fingerprints. So you have one completely separate identity on a given IP (that is not yours), and if it gets blocked, you roll up another completely separate identity on a different IP. But this is too much work for an ordinary consumer who just wants to keep their IP private. So you end up with this excluded middle where the only rational strategies are to either do exactly what the website expects you to do (with no funny business, even if it's innocuous), or to go whole-hog as the aggressor where you're determined to skirt their policies no matter what, and if you're doing that you might as well amortize the effort by extracting everything of value you can from them.
I made my modifications at the network level and auto redirect a configurable set of sites to go to reader mode/paywall bypass by default with a MITM proxy and a custom CA cert I trust
I will instead say "skill issue".
Using Playwright results in some very obvious and easy to detect fingerprints. I'd expect better of someone on hacker news.
Mine hasn't been detected as far as I can tell, so I know it's possible to do better.
While your server handles that, what does your CPU do with the other 99% of available cycles?
I run https://bunnystomp.com on an Always Free VM from a major cloud provider. It handles 1,930 req/s at 33 ms latency with no tuning/optimization. It's literally just python behind cloudflare.
I have no idea what the site you linked does, but it doesn't look like a cgit instance to me; that's what got hammered on my end, and when hosting it, one very quickly finds out that many git operations are CPU-bound.
I'd say yes since you've allowed random people unauthorized use of the connection. It makes no difference if it's your connection or not. For example, if that proxy gets used as part of a DDoS attack, your device compromised that network.
I mean politicians are so addicted to twitter the nsa makes special phones…
It's always better to protect politicians from someone else
> Most of the activity happens in the evening, Eastern time: about half of it falls between 5 p.m. and midnight, and almost none happens in the early morning. That pattern suggests a person rather than a public guest Wi-Fi network: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening, whose device is infected with a proxy SDK. Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them.
There really aren’t very many candidates for who that person might be and it really seems like it would be someone who, I don’t know, maybe lives where the traffic is originating.
I'm no expert but even I've read that "Works at the White House" is bigger than the executive residence and oval office, including the West Wing and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways. The National Security Council maintains 24-hour watch operations in the Situation Room (which is more a 'complex' than 'room'), while regional desk officers routinely work late evenings to overlap with morning business hours in Europe and Asia.
I asked Gemini if my recollection was correct and got: "The EOP network (managed by the EOP Office of Administration in coordination with Presidential Information Technology Community entities like the White House Communications Agency) operates as a single campus enterprise network. Its high-speed backbone links the West Wing, the EEOB, the East Wing, and nearby administrative facilities such as the New Executive Office Building (NEOB) on 17th Street."
So, definitely an issue that there's a device with some rogue malware installed but the total workforce across all shifts at the White House Complex is roughly between 2,500 and 4,000.
I ask in good faith, but why didn't you just say the Treasury Building?
Which in the 1907 case meant 8,513 people's hands.
Guest networks are configured to disallow intranet connectivity, so the "security" risk would be from the device having access to the internet, on a guest network IP. But a guest network exists for the purpose of giving untrusted devices access to the internet, without compromising the security of the intranet. My local library, the local airport, Home Depot, the movie theater, etc all have public wifi, yet nobody would claim they were directly compromised. I understand the connection could be used for receiving and sending packets over the internet, like a DDoS (which would trigger rate limits, even at Home Depot), but framing a guest network, giving an untrusted device access to the internet, as some security issue seems very odd. The isolation is the mitigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_White_House_cocaine_incid...
This almost certainly had nothing to do with the administration. A single search would show that, for those interested in taking that time.
Some visitor forgot their nearly empty baggie of coke and conservatives convinced you Hunter Biden was doing blow with Joe in the Oval Office.
I mean, the nearly empty bag of cocaine isn’t necessary, Progressive Liberals do call* for their execution.
Boo hoo. No one’s stopping you. No one’s cancelling you. If you have something you say, then say it. Otherwise stop crying fake tears about the mean liberals who are somehow censoring you.
But if it want to talk about the baggie of coke, maybe do any research at all instead of listening to lying politicians who claimed it belonged to Hunter Biden with zero evidence (and zero logic).
Oh and also the part where no one has caught this internally which is possibly the bigger takeaway. It’s a zero-trust network made out of incompetence.
Service staff, including the storied hundred or so White House butlers, work whatever hours are needed. Then you have Secret Service, Kitchen staff, Natalie, house admin staff like the Chief Usher, maybe even NPS staff as the WH grounds are a national park as well, any of whom I would assume might be given access to the secure but unclassified WH wifi and likely a government-issued device. One device with a proxy among all of those people? Entirely unsurprising.
Maybe it's just the printer that Natalie carries around in her purse.
Though the fact that it lines up with an 8 hour shift also makes it seem human-like, so I think I'd rank a human carrying an infected device as more likely than an infected periodically-active device.
Is that really how national security works?
If it was someone who lived there it wouldn’t be exclusively that time period. Why wouldn’t it happen overnight or in the morning or any other time of day?
He very famously does not know how to use computers and can only basically manage tweeting from his phone, which he is mostly not, actually, doing himself.
Now, there are two or three terminally online people around him. I would be more quick to point the finger at his foul-mouthed spokesman but it’s admittedly because I hate that guy and he seems rather stupid. But perhaps it could be the devoted portable printer lady, or the overpromoted unblinking former golf caddy guy.
All of them are around to help with the, er, modern day presidential communications.
Despite the constant negative press covfefe
The whole industry is dirty.
There is no evidence that physically ties this to the WH. It could be in a security lab for all they know. Or a guest network for the news media.
They don't need to be physically inside a specific building to be a networking security problem.
The core issue is whether an outsider has bypassed your firewall and can send+receive traffic from a node which is getting more trust than it deserves. If they've compromised the computer's microphone/camera/wifi-control that's an additional problem.
That seems significantly worse.
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/
There's a transcript if you want to read, not listen. At the start, you'll be "hey! I gotta get me one!" and later you'll be like "burn it with fire!"
Such things are threats to humanity imho. They can get us back to the times we couldn't exploit the internet to run a society.
“ Most of the infected devices were manufactured in China. ” uh… most devices are manufactured in China period. Very strange article/podcast.
Firewall it from your local network if you want to - it'll still work - they're not after that.
Not sure why my IP is listed as a residential proxy.
It should be a balancing act though, somewhere between what you said and my first sentence.
Rate limiting, or additional layers of input sanitisation for IP addresses known to have been malicious in the past.
It's unfortunate that good users will have to endure some difficulties because of bad users on the same network, but if security is the priority, then measures must be taken, you shouldn't just leave to door open to potentially known bad users / traffic.
IPv4 is a shared resource, but some ranges have worse reputations than others, and all are owned by organisations that have the ability to monitor and filter for malicious traffic. It gets into a fraught discussion about censorship, but it is possible for network owners to monitor for, and block / restrict traffic detected as 'bad'. It's just a matter of cost and scale, and those that put the effort in should have their users rewarded with fewer 'trust-issues' roadblocks.
Is this like a corporate support response? I legit can't tell. Try explaining to a retail consumer why they can't buy from your site because they have TMobile service.
Why not? If security is the priority, the worst that could happen from that is clutter in logs and higher resource use. Nobody wastes 0days spraying them on random hosts, and a real motivated attacker targeting your server will not be stopped by an ip blacklist.
The lists generated by this tool can be useful as well: https://github.com/maximilianfeix/proxy-scraper (which point to here: https://github.com/maximilianfeix/free-proxy-list)
There is also this bot proxy IP list: https://github.com/antoinevastel/avastel-bot-ips-lists
It's no longer a botnet, it's a "residential proxy" and you are doing clean business.
And I’d argue that’s not clean business, the user doesn’t know what their connection is being used for :)