Residential Proxies Are a National Security Threat
US residential proxies fuel social media manipulation and spam by routing bad actor traffic through hacked home connections. Victims are often tricked by free VPN apps, game SDKs, or malware on smart TVs. Because these IPs look like genuine users, blocking them is difficult, creating a perfect cover for foreign influence campaigns and botnets. I argue that ISPs must warn customers about suspicious activity, and the government should treat this infrastructure as a serious national security risk.
There are obviously perverse incentives here, since significantly reducing the problem would reduce their value.
- userbinator
No, your paranoia-outage is the true "national security threat" - a threat to freedom. Stop fanning the flames and calling for more government intervention.
- Terr_
If someone with informed consent wants to run a residential proxy, that's their right and unlikely to be a national-security problem.
When it comes to involunary proxies, those are really just one of many possible symptoms stemming from a real problem: Shitty security. (Edit: And shitty contract/privacy laws.)
Shitty security is tolerated by our markets, is is protected from fixes due to copyright law, and it is even encouraged by parts of our government that want to exploit the flaws. We will gain far more from fundamental quality-improvements than we will from whack-a-mole-ing on this symptom.
- brikym
They have their problems but how else am I supposed to scrape data from companies that want to hide it?
- torginus
My personal opinion is they're not hard to detect at all. Latency is a huge giveaway, If the client can't respond in a time you'd expect a client to be able to based on its geographic location, that's a pretty big tell they're using proxies. In fact, if you did latency sensitive stuff, you'd likely find out whether you wanted to or not.
- BLKNSLVR
From a previous HN discussion, these are known DNS addresses to block in regards to Smart TVs being used a residential proxies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422993
Specific Domains:
proxyjs.brdtnet.com
proxyjs.luminatinet.com
proxyjs.bright-sdk.com
clientsdk.bright-sdk.com
clientsdk.brdtnet.com
Wildcard domains:
*.brdtnet.com
*.luminatinet.com
*.luminati.io
Source:
https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-you...