Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House?
Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.
The security firm Layer3 Intel said it detected multiple residential proxy nodes beaconing out from the internet address network reserved for the Executive Office of the President ( AS2650 ). Layer3 said the proxy activity was relatively persistent between October 5 to November 3, and that a review of the proxies available from AS2650 showed they exited from the White House network 236 times during that period.
The proxy tracking company Synthient said on Twitter/X that the activity it saw coming from AS2650 was related to multiple Windows 11 installations of a service called Infatica, a proxy program that is often integrated into “free” mobile and desktop applications. Infatica’s founder Vladimir Fomenko is a Russian man whose hosting firm King Servers was home to six of the eight internet addresses used by Russia’s state security services to compromise databases for election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.
Synthient’s depiction of the frequency of outgoing proxy traffic from the dedicated White House network (AS2650). Click to enlarge.
There are dozens of residential proxy providers with varying degrees of legitimacy, many of them based in China or Russia. But at a minimum, they all make it simple for customers to rent someone else’s internet address as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer…