Hola, an Israeli peer-to-peer VPN service, has been outed by a cohort of coders, hackers, and privacy advocates calling themselves Adios for selling access to users internet connections and IP addresses. Taken at face value, Hola enables people to access websites that might be geo-restricted or blocked by allowing them to route their web requests through other users IP addresses in different physical l o cations. For example, if you were trying to access Gmail from mainland China (where Googles services are blocked), Hola would enable you to direct your traffic through an IP address in a country with open access to Google.
The issue at hand is that many of Holas subscribers were not aware that their connections could be turned into access points for users who might want to do more than access restricted websites unless they subscribed to Holas $5 monthly premium plan. Hola users are at risk of having their IP addresses co-opted in ways that could enable other users to view child p*rnography or share copyrighted material, which would technically put them at risk.
Skype did, in fact, once operate on a peer to peer infrastructure before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2011. In 2013 Skypes lead architect Michael Kaufman explained in a public e-mail that Skype had been in the process of moving its backend infrastructure onto its own centrally controlled servers long before Microsoft officially planned to take over the company.
Skype wanted to move to its network onto its own serves in order to av o id the kind of massive outages caused by weaknesses in its old the P2P structure that had knocked Skype offline globally in the past.
Botnets are networks of compromised computers that have been hacked using malware that gives a single user the ability to command multiple computers to carry out malicious attacks (like denial of service) on targeted servers. A series of denial of service attacks were recently launched against the popular imageboard 8chan, severely affecting the sites ability to run. 8chan founder Frederick Brennan believes the attacks were carried out using Holas platforms.
When a user installs Hola, he becomes a VPN endpoint, and other users of the Hola network may exit through his internet connection and take on his IP, 8chan founder Frederick Brennan explained in a critical blog post dated May 26. This is what makes it free: Hola does not pay for the bandwidth that its VPN uses at all, and there is no user opt out for this.
Going forward, Hola plans to launch a bug bounty program meant to encourage people to seek out and discover future weaknesses in the service. Adios has not responded to requests for comment about Holas insistence that it has sufficiently addressed all of its criticisms.
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