this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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158
VPN used for VR game cheat sells access to your home network (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Big Mama VPN tied to network which offers access to residential IP addresses.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 3 days ago (2 children)

TL;DR: They used free VPN called Big Mama.

From their FAQ: https://bigma.org/faq.html

How is it possible to keep it free?
The devices of our free VPN customers are used to create a secure peer-to-peer network that our commercial clients can use to securely route their traffic via various global endpoints. As a free client, you will likely not notice any impact on your resources as that happens. The data transferred in the background will be metered by your mobile operator according to your data plan.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So it's literally up front and in their FAQ that they do this. So why is this a story?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Because scary words!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What does this mean? What use would "their clients" need access to your network? What are they routing to through your network and how does that help with efficiency?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

IP addresses.

Their commercial clients are doing things that give IPs bad reputation or banned from services, so they use this service to get access to home IPs to use.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So scammers and similar ilk?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

It would not shock me if companies like OpenAi would have used something like this so they could harvest large amounts of data without setting off usage limits. While sketchy not sure if this counts as scammy.