# "Free Proxies" and Malware: Is there a Connection?



## Jennifer Blue (Jan 16, 2011)

Lately I've been cruising Black Hat forums, checking out the dark side and got clued into proxies. And I've been messing with them.

Found a bunch of sites that have entire lists of "free proxies" that you can just use for whatever. Surprisingly, most of them work, and most of those are fairly fast. And a lot of them are high anonymity. I assumed until just a bit ago that they were used primarily by spammers.

I get asked a lot by customers "Why do they make viruses?" and I have to basically make up an answer because, well I don't really know. Seems like a bad thing to do, and I really can't understand why someone would WANT to write code that harms another person's computer. They're bad people and that's that.

So, while in the middle of playing with my "free proxies" I had this little flash of an idea that maybe, after I press the "send" button, some poor, average person's computer is relaying my web-page request.

Could they be my "free proxy"? Could this be one of the reasons why malware author's do what they do?

So, second level, I start thinking about why they would make these lists public. They could have someone's computer available to do whatever they do, and the more people that use it the slower it will run and then the User will fix the computer and "poof", no more "free proxy".

Then realized if a person were doing illegal activities via an infected person's computer, having lots of people from all over the world "doing things" with it might make it more difficult to trace, and to use as evidence, if it ever came to that.

So, how plausible does all of this sound, or am I way out in the weeds here?


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