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Would be great if it told me how recently it was detected. I have a dynamic IP from my ISP and it could very well be someone else's device 3 days or 3 months ago.
The TTL for our data is 2-3 days so you can be fairly confident that it is up to date.
My public IP is shared with some 150 people in a student dorm, and the result is negative which I find very unlikely.
Some are quite good at limiting connections, monitoring devices, and contacting students for suspicious traffic.
this company Spur recently got millions in funding and their pricing seems to be directed at large companies. Who's buying these absolutely non-actionable IP databases? Do corporate buyers not understand you can't just block someone because they share the IP with someone else who downloaded a dodgy app?
Spur's residential proxy data is not intended to be used as a blacklist. We recommend using it as enrichment alongside other signals, not blocking an IP just because it was associated with proxy activity. More on why here: https://spur.us/blog/i-dont-like-big-gateways-and-i-cannot-l...
this company Spur recently got millions in funding and their pricing seems to be directed at large companies. Who's buying these absolutely non-actionable IP databases? Do corporate buyers not understand you can't just block someone because they share the IP with someone else who downloaded a dodgy app?
Lack of any IoCs also makes it hard to refute or remedy. Plus I think it paints even Tor relay nodes with the same brush as malicious proxies.
Truly kafkaesque if you start getting restricted and nobody tells you why or even knows what to tell you because the sources have all been mixed and obscured.
This would probably false positive every CGNAT IP, or am I misunderstanding something?
If there were people under the same CGNAT with someone running one of those exit nodes, then that's not a false positive.
In any case, residential proxies are a godsend. Because most of the everyday services like web shops, govt information portals, even personal blogs sometimes are blocking access usings captchas.
EDIT: they write this on their marketing copy [0]:
> The Spur platform identifies traffic originating from residential proxy networks by analyzing service fingerprints, ASN ownership, and behavioral indicators.
Sounds like guesswork that results in a ton of false positives. And the more innocent IPs are blocked by platforms on the basis of this data, the more the demand increases for residential proxies, from users who need access to essential services. Talk of creating the problem and then selling the "solution".
wow my comment with a blog post about a better approach to detect residential proxies got... removed! Not sure about HN internals, do moderators do that or is this OP using several accounts to downvote contrarian comments?
We had a previous discussion about surfacing visitor IP address resproxy status explicitly. Should we have some sort of badge or a more explicit alert to show if a site visitor's IP address is part of a residential proxy network?
Even though it is great for demonstrating the product's value, it is kind of a low-tier value. What can a user actually do when they realize their IP address is part of a residential proxy pool?
The first issue is that residential proxy SDK infiltration is massive. If you start connecting to different IP addresses and constantly check your IP address on our website, you will often see that many of those IP addresses were, at some point, part of a residential proxy pool. We provide frequency information showing how many times an IP address was observed in a residential proxy pool, with a default observation period of 7 days.
Then there is the question of what a user can actually do about it. If it is a controlled IT environment with paranoid IT admins, sure, they can actively monitor traffic and identify why their IPs are showing up in residential proxy pools. They can attempt to do something about it. But it is not easy even then.
Residential proxy SDKs can simply be baked into almost any smartphone or smartphone-derived OS that allows app installation through marketplaces. So, many residential networks are already cooked (because of android TVs). Moderate-scale NAT connections almost always see residential proxy flags, as do public Wi-Fi hotspot IPs, which we also detect.
Identifying the apps that are generating background network traffic is quite hard. You need some level of DNS monitoring or a network sniffer. Alternatively, you need router-level firewall software.
These SDKs are not always sending high-volume, constant traffic that makes them easy to detect. If you see a 100% residential proxy flag for your IP address, then they probably are. But in many cases, the traffic is intermittent and much harder to identify.
Nobody has an answer to what I should do when I see my IP address in a residential proxy pool. It has been accepted in spirit as a "consented malware" for the last few years. It is undetectable and extremely hard to remove because the SDK has been baked into apps themselves.