Name: How Millions of Digital Home Devices Are Secretly Powering Cyberattacks
Uploaded: 2026-06-15T15:36:00Z
Duration: 8 min 53 s
Description: WSJ’s Jack Gillum investigates how residential proxy software, which comes pre-installed on many knockoff consumer devices, is allowing hackers to piggyback on household Internet connections to carry out illegal activity.

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WSJ’s Jack Gillum investigates how residential proxy software, which comes pre-installed on many knockoff consumer devices, is allowing hackers to piggyback on household Internet connections to carry out illegal activity. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260615/f411ac06-c2a2-4f0e-8617-93a1ca95b340/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

WSJ’s Jack Gillum investigates how residential proxy software, which comes pre-installed on many knockoff consumer devices, is allowing hackers to piggyback on household Internet connections to carry out illegal activity.

How Millions of Digital Home Devices Are Secretly Powering Cyberattacks

Smart doorbells, security cameras, thermostats, tablets, cell phones. Our homes are filled with internet-connected devices. And every year, millions of those products, especially knockoffs that you buy online, can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet so that anyone, including bad actors, can surf the web as if they were you. Now cyber criminals are taking advantage of this loophole, leveraging home internet connections and the devices that rely on them to carry out the biggest cyberattacks we've ever seen. All right, the picture frames are down here. To better understand how this backdoor works, I bought a few of these digital devices. I wanted to see what would happen when I connected them in my own home. For just under $800 total, I purchased two digital picture frames from Amazon and three super boxes from Walmart. These are streaming devices that connect to your TV and give you free access to shows and movies. We picked these devices because we heard that they often ship with backdoor software used in cyberattacks. Security experts believe manufacturers are being paid to add this malware, but many people also get tricked into downloading the software onto their phones or computers. Once you connect an infected device to the internet, the backdoor software links up with an intermediary server that's run by what's known as a Residential Proxy company. These companies are in the business of renting out your internet connection to paying customers, basically allowing their customers to surf the internet in disguise from your home network. Sometimes this activity is legitimate. Companies can use Res Proxy networks to see how their ads are being viewed from the perspective of real users, but others use them for nefarious purposes, like hacking or bank fraud. Let's connect this to my test network. Within minutes of turning the devices on, there was a surge of internet traffic on an entirely separate internet connection I set up for this experiment. Visits to gambling, porn, cryptocurrency, and loads of other sketchy websites started pouring in from users around the world. Let's check in and see what this picture frame is doing now. Huh, this is really strange. It's all these different websites that is definitely not coming from me or anything in my house. It's trying to access Outlook accounts, it's trying to access Gmail. Some cyber police, someone's trying to use Google Voice. I love you, please don't touch me.net. These Residential Proxy companies rent out access to tens of millions of home networks around the world, but the problem is actually worse than that. Hackers figured out a way to seize control of these back doors, and they started taking over these residential networks. Last month, authorities arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man, saying he'd taken control of more than a million of these devices to launch some of the largest cyberattacks anyone had ever seen. I had a hunch my picture frames were involved in some of this coordinated cyber crime. So I called Elliott Peterson to find out what law enforcement is doing to investigate criminals who use residential proxies to conduct large scale attacks. Have you knocked on the door of somebody who's had a device connected to one of these networks?

So I have, it's one of the more interesting parts of my job. You know, so I'll be calling a victim and explaining that I am with the US Department of Defense, that I think they're infected, and they're discovering that there may be this problem with this, you know, overseas manufactured thing they just bought online, and we're really having to sort of talk 'em into, "Will you please ship it to us?" Because that becomes this basis for the evidence that we can then go after the administrator with. So that is a really frequent occurrence for us.

I've seen residential proxies used for certainly legal means. Where do folks generally draw the line between those sorts of activity and what we're seeing on the nefarious side?

The first question we're often looking at is, did the owner of the device consent to this type of behavior? Are they allowing people, intentionally allowing people to share their internet traffic? And if the answer is no, then I would argue there's not really any legitimate use for that service. You have to try really hard to find Residential Proxy services where you have a knowing and willing IP address that you're accessing.

Why should consumers care about this? Either for themselves or sort of for the the broader picture?

So they should care for themselves because these things put their data at risk, put their internet connection at risk. But when you zoom out and ask the question about why should everybody care? Well, people are using these to do all sorts of crime, and so we all want to sort of find and defeat these Residential Proxy networks.

Comcast is one of the companies investigating this threat and agreed to help conduct a deeper analysis of my data. But first they showed me how they run their own testing, using a Faraday cage. It prevents potentially infected products from connecting to their corporate network or infecting nearby devices.

It allows us to put a device that has wifi or Bluetooth or other signals in this box. We know the enterprise around us is protected, and we can do our testing here.

So what does it say about the danger of these devices, if this is the lengths that we have to go through?

We know these devices are accessible by threat actors. We know people can get access to these devices, so we don't want any opportunity for that device to somehow get access to our corporate network, other devices we're testing, we really need it to be completely isolated. We absolutely believe these devices are insecure. Some straight out of the box.

Ran these for a couple of months at home and collected all of the traffic going back and forth of them and sent them to you guys. What did you find?

So in short, what we found was all these devices were doing things you would not have wanted to be doing. So both of them were conducting what we call distributed denial of service attacks. On the streaming device in particular, there were people logging in kind of, I think it was about every 10 minutes or every half hour, repeatedly trying to log into the device directly.

That means they weren't just sharing the network, they were trying to hack it. With these residential proxies, where would you put them in terms of the ecosystem of overall cybersecurity threats?

There's a thousand cyber threats we could be spending time on. This is about the biggest problem we know of in the consumer space for digital risk right now.

Around the world, ballpark, how many of these devices are infected?

The numbers range. We've heard anything from tens of millions. There's some estimates that say a hundred million, even 500 million plus devices. The numbers are outrageous. The most complicated bit to me about this ecosystem, so to speak, is there isn't a clear estimate.

We're not just talking about not safe for work websites that you don't want your boss to see coming by. We're talking about much deeper, sophisticated, even dangerous sorts of activity, potentially.

What we saw in the data you sent us was certainly of that nature, where people were actively trying to control the box remotely. What I will also remind us is it's a set of rotating actors. So who bought it today and who bought it tomorrow and who bought it in five minutes, that's all gonna change. We've seen nation state attacks launched through these kinds of endpoints, which means your device sitting at your house is part of a nation state attack against another nation state. Again, something none of us want in our everyday lives in our digital devices. We've seen ad fraud, we've seen ticket scalping, we've seen financial fraud.

You mentioned these sort of distributed denial of service attacks, which takes lots of actors. It can be nation states, it could be groups of just any sort of threat actor. How do they all leverage these devices to carry out these really bad activities?

Let's imagine you and I, we pile every friend of ours we've ever known. We say, "Hey, at 12 noon on Thursday, let's send a bunch of traffic to some site we're not thrilled with today." That's effectively what a distributed denial of service attack is. But now it's done at massive scale. Let's say a million machines, two million machines, are doing that simultaneously. What we're seeing is through these Res Proxy networks, that's the initial entry point that creates a whole set of computers, laptops, streaming devices, picture frames, smart refrigerators, all hitting the same site at the same time. Very few sites in the world are resilient to that level of inbound traffic. We have seen some of the largest computer attacks, meaning computers attacking other computers at human request, ever recorded in our digital history in the last several months. So if you go to the same kind of conferences I go to with a bunch of other computer geeks, talking about computer geeky things, we'll talk about the scale of these attacks being the largest we have ever seen, and some warning there are much larger ones on the horizon if we don't get a hold of this problem.

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