The Web Is Broken – Botnet Part 2

Summary

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you! TL;DR certain companies recruit app developers to create botnets by injecting “network sharing” SDKs into their apps. These botnets then use the network bandwidth of unsuspecting users of said apps to crawl the web, brute-force mail servers and other nasty things. Botnets are malware. Period. The web is broken, IMHO. So there is a (IMHO) shady market out there that gives app developers on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows money for including a library into their apps that sells users network bandwidth. Infatica is just one example, there are many more. I am 99% sure that these companies cause what effectively are DDoS attacks by aggressive AI crawlers that many webmasters have to deal with since months. This business model should simply not exist. Apple, Microsoft and Google should act. From the Infatica SDK page, explaining how app developers can make money by including the Infatica SDK What these companies then sell to their customers is network access through the devices/PCs that have an app with this SDK installed. They are proud to tell you how you can funnel your (AI) web scraping etc through millions of rotating, residential and mobile IP addresses. Exactly the pattern we see hitting our servers. Infatica claiming they have millions and millions of IP addresses to hand to you What I would call “infected users” are called “residential IPs” in this specific market There are many Now, again, this company is just one of many selling similar services. And they all promise that they carefully check what commands their customers send to the (IMHO) infected apps on your phone and PC. Yeah, I am sure they “do no evil”. And when they do, they can claim it’s n...