An Extensive Study of Residential Proxies in China

What is it about?

Residential proxies (RESIPs) emerge in recent years and are playing an increasingly important role in various online activities, especially cyber attacks. In this paper, the authors presents the first of its kind study on residential proxies located in China. This study has captured more than 9 million RESIPs and tens of RESIP services along with a variety of insightful observations on RESIPs in terms of their landscape, evolution, security risks, and supply chain. Particularly, in addition to a wide distribution in almost all the cities in China, 3 millions of China RESIPs IPs were found to have ever listened to public TCP/UDP ports so as to accept incoming relaying traffic, which may open up new loopholes for attackers to compromise the local networks where RESIPs reside. Also, during 2021, around 80% China RESIPs had evolved in one or more malicious traffic flows, e.g., malicious crypto mining, and , and thousands of them have ever distributed malicious content such as botnet payloads.

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It is the first research study on residential proxies in China, along with novel and efficient methodologies designed, millions of residential proxies and tends of proxy services captured, and a set of novel security findings distilled.

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