Adiós, Hola!
Whoever first said that the best things in life are free forgot to mention that there's often a catch. For users of the super popular Hola VPN extension for browsers, the cost for using the free add-on came in the form of forking over bandwidth and unknowingly being a part of a botnet.
Let's back up a moment. You may have noticed that VPNs have risen in popularity as of late. There are multiple reasons -- some users want the added privacy that VPNs provide, while others are trying to sidestep regional restrictions for streaming services like Netflix, which is probably the bigger reason why VPNs are on the rise.
Hola is one of the more popular VPNs (or VPN-like service) with more than 46 million users around the world because it's free, whereas many of the good ones typically charge a fee. It's also easy to use. However, it was recently discovered that there's a cost, and pretty big one at that.
The service sells users' bandwidth. This ties in with how Hola operates -- instead of routing traffic through dedicated servers, it sends traffic through other users' connections, claiming to only use idle resources in the process (ExtremeTech cries foul on that claim).
To be fair, Hola discloses this on its FAQ page:
Hola is free for private (non-commercial) use. The only exception is Hola VPN on iOS which costs $4.99 (monthly) or $44.99 (annual) due to Apple's restrictions. Commercial use of Hola for business class VPN is available through our Luminati service. The Hola peer to peer architecture makes Hola free and secure. However, some users may prefer not to contribute their idle resources to the Hola network, and thus can join the Hola premium service which lets you use Hola without your idle resources being used in return.
The bottom line is Luminati sells Hola users' bandwidth for a fee. That's fine, though Hola should be a little more upfront and clear about that. However, the bigger issue is that Hola's screening process apparently needs some work.
According to Business Insider, Frederick Brennan (otherwise known as "Hotwheels"), administrator of 8chan, noted a 100x spike over peak traffic. He traced the attack to a user called "Bui" who later told him that he used Hola's Luminati service to create a botnet and carry out the attack.
There might not be much sympathy for 8chan, a rule-less destination on the web that's been known to host some despicable content. But the bigger point is that Hola users unknowingly participated in a botnet.
We suppose the moral of the story here is to always read the fine print.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1eE7YKP
