Nothing new
Anonymous proxies have been punting malware for years.
Parent-thwarting bypass tool takes kids to internet badlands
Cybercrooks have developed a new ruse primarily designed to expose kids to malware and survey scams. A fraudulent proxy server service that offers a supposed mechanism to bypass parental control (censorware) restrictions actually leads to an "affiliate site loaded with malcode, links to cellphone subscription scams and other …
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If you're not paraoid they will get you
Who'd have thought that a proxy service (paid or unpaid) could monitor and/or tamper with the data it forwards? Colour me amazed.
The default assumption must be that any proxy server (especially an anonymising proxy) is a honeypot: if not directly run by LEA or criminals then at least with a hotline to (or hackable by) them.
The best one can expect is your information will be sold on to 'benign' marketing companies.
Except
That the key point I took from this article is that it's targeted at children. Kids who want to get around the parental filter on their family pc aren't going to have a working knowledge of proxy servers and will just click on whatever promises to do what they want.
You've gotta laugh!
On one side we've got MPs demanding that all Net users must provide ID to prove they're over 18 before they're allowed to access porn and now, on the other side we've got crooks who are already *actively exploiting* this sort of nonsense!
To be fair, it does work.
I felt reasonable safe visiting that site with Firefox, running on a Mac so I tried it out with whatismyip.com and sure enough it really is a proxy. But just as sure it plasters the page with half a dozen brightly colored banner ads (it made me feel rather nostalgic for the web 1.0 days actually) and spawns talking pop-unders.
Best wear your safety glasses.
NetNanny
interestingly NetNanny - which I've been looking at for my kids after a creepy chatroom incident - claims to already foil the use of online proxies.
of course, would be nice to have a router that does some of this at the infrastructure level so even if the kids manage to stop it on the PC they still can't sneak around (OpenDNS does a pretty good job of that for us)
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