Hola — A widely popular Free VPN service used as a Giant Botnet

Summary: Hola, a free VPN browser plugin with more than 6 million Chrome Store downloads, sells access to users' bandwidth through a third-party service called Luminati, which resells those connections, founder Ofer Vilenski confirmed. 8chan administrator Fredrick Brennan said his site was hit by thousands of "legitimate-looking POST requests" within 30 seconds, a 100x spike over peak traffic that crashed PHP-FPM, and a spammer known as "Bui" later told him he had used Hola's Luminati service to carry out the attack.
Why it matters: Every user running the free version of Hola had their connection sold without their knowledge, which means their IP address can be the one logged in a denial-of-service attack they never launched. Hola's FAQ mentioned possible "commercial" use but did not name Luminati, which had been working with the company since at least October 2014.

Read the original at The Hacker News ↗