Well-Known Hola Website Being Used as Center of Botnet for Hire

Hola is one of the most renowned online services for seeing banned videos and television shows from other nations and it has turned its patrons into a botnet without their consent. The software, accessible as a plug-in in Google's Chrome on desktops and mobiles devices and it had been applauded before for giving an easy-to-use and free service. However, it appears that the enterprise has been secretly selling "idle resources" (i.e. their bandwidth) of users through a separate Luminati brand enabling anyone to buy traffic in lump sum and redirect it to a target website as a denial-of-service attack. Theverge.com reported on 29th May, 2015 stating that essentially users of Hola have been ignorant mercenaries in a botnet-for-hire.

It is believed that during the end of 2014, Hola realized that they have 9 million IP huge botnet at their disposal and started selling access to this botnet.

The allegations were made by Fredrick Brennan, founder of the infamous forum 8chan.

Torrentfreak.com published news on 28th May, 2015 quoting him as saying "computers of Hola users were employed to attack his website without their consent and this was possible because of setup of Hola."

Brennan ads: "On installing Hola a user becomes an end point of VPN and other patrons of Hola network may exit through his web connection and take on his IP. This makes it complimentary: Hola does not forfeit for the bandwidth which its VPN employs at all and there is no patron who selects this."

This means that instead of having their IPs concealed behind a confidential server, free Hola patrons are regularly revealing their IPs to the world and getting associated with traffic of other people irrespective of what that might contain.

Hola has declined to take the responsibility for the 8chan cyber attack but promised to release the details of the criminal provided Brennan acquires necessary court order.

Digitalspy.co.uk published a report on 31st May, 2015 quoting statement of the firm as "If 8chan was damaged, then a rational course of action would be to acquire a court order for information and we can reveal the contact information of this user so that they can further pursue the damages with him."

» SPAMfighter News - 6/9/2015