A Deep Dive into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’ | Hacker News Reader

A Deep Dive into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’

krebsonsecurity.com

84 pointstodsacerdoti35 comments

Case in point why you should never ever use a 3rd party VPN ever for any reason. Even for something quick.

There are plenty of good/trustworthy VPN services. They just don't advertise as much as the bad ones. I know that the VPN company I use can't abuse my connection because I don't even use their app, and can instead set up wireguard/OpenVPN connections to my liking.

Beyond the technical side, a public VPN company provides much more anonymity than using your own VPS/server, as you share an IP and traffic with other users rather than just having a second personal IP to your name.

>There are plenty of good/trustworthy VPN services. They just don't advertise as much as the bad ones.

This is also why I always immediately unsubscribe from and stop watching any YouTuber who starts pushing these services. They are 100% shady. Which leaves only two possibilities; that the content creator is either naive or willfully complicit.

Almost 100% of them are naive, unless they’re crypto bros.

> There are plenty of good/trustworthy VPN services

Unless you know how they operate, they all are untrustworthy. It's just how you trust them.

Even if it's the case today, change of ownership tomorrow may bring totally new SOPs.

This is why there is no good/trustworthy VPN services.

Krebs has generally great content, but how the Ubiquiti situation was handled really rubbed me the wrong way. Krebs made a mistake, trusting a source that ended up being the malicious party. However Krebs never owned up to it. Never issued an apology or admitted his frankly scathing posts about Ubiquiti were inaccurate or at best incomplete. It’s unfortunately a common theme these days in media.

This and his predilection to doxx his opponents is reason enough to block his site from social media platforms. He's a bad egg.

Can I find a rundown of this situation somewhere?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/ubiquiti-sues-jo...

He’s one of very few people doing this type of investigative journalism online, and is - as cringey as it sounds - the closest we’ve got to an IRL ‘internet superhero’.

Ubi was a bad call but the information was credible - as an insider, the informant was in a unique position to spin his story in such a way. I don’t blame him for making the bad call, and I don’t think he should ‘own up to it’.

That one story is far from representative of his broader achievements, and comparing it to the concerted efforts other more malicious actors in the media landscape is disingenuous at best.

1. Krebs' source was anonymous and he has not confirmed it to be the party responsible.

2. Ubiquiti is currently suing Krebs for defamation, and the lawsuit is the source of the allegation that Krebs' source and the indicted person are one and the same.

3. Krebs' original article does report both sides of the issue, albeit with a scathing tone regarding UI's security disclosure practices.

4. Even if Krebs' source turned out to be the indicted individual, it is still ethical to avoid revealing the source. No one has been convicted.

5. It is generally not a smart move to apologize for an action that is at the center of an ongoing legal action, in any case.

> “During the research we identified two free VPN services that [use] a subterfuge to lure users to install software that looks legitimate but makes them part of the network. These two software are currently unknown to most if not all antivirus companies.”

I wonder why that is? It couldn't possibly be that antivirus companies are paid to ignore certain software...

Why not? It's not obvious to detect until anyone found a minor free VPN app is malicious. (Though maybe almost all "free VPN" could be malicious in some way)

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