[Fergazi]

The bots name is Objective_Land_2849.

In the last year or so I've noticed a lot of accounts whose username follows this naming format. Usually its: Adjective_noun_1234 but sometimes the underscores are hyphens. I really do wonder if these are all bot accounts.

[SnorkelTan]

If you created your own accounts instead of buying them, you would know that this format is the username format reddit automatically suggests for you :).

Also residential proxies are overkill unless you're doing crime. They also likely expose you to participation in a criminal conspiracy since the provenance of those ips is sketchy at best. IANAL YMMV. Mullvad offers a year subscription for ~$50. Also they support wireguard and you could use something like wireproxy and violla, 100s of ips and no crime in your supply chain*.

* I haven't tried posting to reddit with mullvad ips.

edit: looks like you're not op, sorry... The first paragraph is for you tho.

[costco]

I use what https://www.pingproxies.com/ calls ISP Proxies, which I think is just them reselling a /22 they got from Charter. Definitely aren't botnet proxies because they have 100% uptime. Duly noted about VPNs though! I would imagine Reddit is more VPN tolerant than most sites.

[SnorkelTan]

Thanks for the tip. Didn't know these were a thing. Have you done any research into them? It seems like with these sorts of ventures a lowly techie like myself doesn't have a lot of ways to validate if what they say in their marketing is actually true.

The uptime is a pretty strong signal tho.

[costco]

I did a whois on the IPs I was given and found they were owned by one ISP and were all in a similar range so there's that. A lot of ISPs (especially T-Mobile) lease IP space out like this too: https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-network.... I would probably be paying a lot less if they were unethically sourced.

In general, if a provider advertises a 5-figure-IP-sized "pool" of IPs with a guaranteed number of "ports" (simultaneous connections), then the operator is almost certainly someone looking to monetize a botnet. Usually the cheapest plan would be something like pool of 20000 IPs - 500 connections, with the number of connections maxing out at 1/4-1/2 of the total IPs due to diurnal dynamics (people in major botnet victim countries like India/China often turn off their routers every night). Also advertising really specific geotargeting is often a sign that they are marketing to carders. The Krebs articles about awmproxy/TDSS are pretty good if you enjoy reading about this kind of thing :)

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/rent-a-bot-networks-tied... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/06/the-link-between-awm-pro...

[pingtechnology]

Hello,

Tim, Managing Director at Ping Proxies here. You're correct - we work with various ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum and a bunch of others.

We announce IP blocks with their residential connectivity and have proxies that benefit from datacenter uptime/connectivity while also looking like they're real residential connections.

We currently manage 50,000+ proxies in this configuration.

The downsides over having a peer network are that fixed costs are much more expensive and locations are limited - we have London, Berlin, Ashburn and New York while peer networks have basically every city on the planet but one of the largest benefits is the ethical nature of our product and the compliance that brings.

Let me know if you have any questions at all and thanks for supporting us!

Cheers, Tim at Ping

[SnorkelTan]

Brian’s newsletter is one of the few I actually subscribe to. Thank you for these links. From the posts it actually looks like you’d probably pay more if they were botnet shenanigan’s.

[hammyhavoc]

I get loads of these following me, they're usually professional exhibitionists on OnlyFans.

[AlecSchueler]

Professional exhibitionists is a term I've never heard before. Do other models or pornography actors fall into the same category?

[hammyhavoc]

I made the term up on the spot as I didn't want to invalidate what keeps people afloat in a relatively safe environment, and not all of it is sexual in its nature.

But yes, I would consider anybody providing sexually explicit or suggestive material as being a professional exhibitionist.