Free VPN Is Really DDoS Botnet in Disguise
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ค. 2024
- Your roundup of cyber security tech news :)
0:00 Intro
0:14 Free VPN Is Really a DDoS Botnet in Disguise
4:51 Smart Watches target US Military
8:38 Full Extent of Encrochat Operation Revealed
Sources:
Free VPN:
lecromee.github.io/posts/swin...
www.androidpolice.com/malware...
www.hackread.com/swing-vpn-an...
Military receiving smart watches:
securityaffairs.com/147788/in...
www.cid.army.mil/Media/Press-...
www.darkreading.com/threat-in...
Encrochat:
www.bleepingcomputer.com/news...
www.europol.europa.eu/media-p...
===============================================
My Website: www.seytonic.com/
Follow me on TWTR: / seytonic
Follow me on INSTA: / jhonti
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If it’s free you are the product is a great quote to describe free VPNs as well.
Or it’s open source
But if I buy TH-cam premium I am still a product!
he literally said that in the video
"if it's free you are the product"
I bet you smell like a Redditor
😂😂😂
Proton vpn is probably the only paid vpn that offers a very limited free version which is paid for by the ones that use the paid version. The free capability is there for those who are journalists or in countries with restricted access to the internet (which also means restrictions to being able to pay for a vpn). They often highlight this in all of proton it's services, especially their mailcient, that paying or donating also helps people who don't have the privileges many of us internet users do when it comes to paying for a service.
@@TylerTMGgood luck with that 💀
so it's safe?
@@Obedthian-UK yes, it is.
@@twilightaesthetic oh my god. i'm so happy! i had to use a vpn to avoid an internet cuttage and i used proton VPN, but now i was a little worried
I use the free Proton VPN version and I didn't even notice it had a paid version, what even are the differences cause honestly the free version is amazing and probably is the only trustworthy free VPN.
there is zero to reason to use a free vpn for privacy. if you really need privacy, things like tor or mullvad are your best friend
Yep, mullvad is actually anonymous unlike the vast majority of others.
@@_modiX At the very least, mullvad has one proven case where they don't hand out anything identifiable about their customer, unlike anyone's isp
@@_modiXthey where raided an not a single customer was compromised. This is really good
@@herrlehrer1479 the most important thing in clandestine ops is a good legend.
lol tor is a government ran project but go on
Time to generate some engagement for a person who doesn't run adds for things they don't believe in. Thank you, you're real cool)
:)
ads*
@@Seytonickeep up the great work !
✨⭐🙏⭐✨
@@Seytonic Proxy VPN is the only VPN that is currently free and they acheive this by giving you a small amount of servers.
Love these videos!
Who would had thought
uh
@@Seedwhose account did you buy lmao
@@ItIsJaneems like a stolen hacked account
I did
@@SeedLMAO 😂😂😂😂 subscriber inflation gone wild
The new developer who re-released the vpn with the same name has 23 different vpn apps published under their name
So the developer is probably trying to get cash in on the name
If it was the original Developer, they would have released it under a different name to not get banned again immediately
Which VPN did the developer re- release?
Unsolicited Smart watches: If they are being mailed to military personnel then they are using the devices to track the soldiers overseas to figure out deployments, locations, etc. That's a great way to figure out where classified and top secret missions are going.
It blows my mind that anybody, even a civilian, would just accept a free and unsolicited object with tracking abilities from a stranger. Given that these are soldiers who should reasonably expect that espionage could be an imminent problem at some point, just makes it a thousand times more unbelievable. If I was a soldier and some mystery party sent me a SMART WATCH, I would immediately take it to my superior officers and let them know that something sketchy is happening to me. That's so obvious.
@@NickC_222 Thing is most people don't realise that just by inserting that stick to your computer or setting up a smart watch is enough to spread the malware, so "hmmm I wonder what's this?" is a very powerful psychological tool when spreading malware, it's kinda like opening a letter bomb.
I made a similar comment. You would think government or military personnel would be immediately suspicious of any mysterious deliveries of equipment that wasn’t ordered? As opposed to distributing the shady electronics among the ranks with no questions or hesitation.
@@shannonspage9360 Right? That's super suspicious lol
@@NickC_222 yeah like... it seems like such an obvious take to say that you shouldn't accept tracking devices from random people, because they could be tracking you
“If something is free, you are the product.” Remember this quote and next time you see something is free think about it. In most cases you are the product.
VPN's usefulness depends on where you currently are
in Russia I can't even use Twitter without one
half the websites are either banned by the Russian communications bureau
or are themselves actively blocking users from Russia
Exactly. I use it only occasionally when I meet an aware website.
Hello, russian friend. How many websites are blocked over there? Must be terrible
@@alternatedenz not really. I mostly angry at Deviantart that doesn't load pictures without vpn, and AO3 not working at all for some reason. But most of the time I'm fine and glad for natural adblock.
Who would have thought that vpn companies make money somehow.
"Somehow?" - Maybe a free one. Paid ones are very profitable, at least with how slow most of the populations internet still is. A single $5 or less 1g server with 1 core can easily handle quite a few clients, and for a VPN company buying in bulk with 12+ month commitments, it's probably significantly cheaper than it would be for a single client.
The fact that Proton has a free version entirely paid for by paid users with 30+ 10G servers in 3 countries with amazing speeds (I use it 24/7) is proof of their profitability.
@@DanniDuck I think you're forgetting that bandwidth is surprisingly expensive. At vultr's 1 cent per GB you're looking at $10 a month for 1TB. The average household consumes around 500GB of bandwidth a month so that's $5 a month in expenses minimum per user. And that's an extremely generous estimate given how much bandwidth costs for most cloud providers, with aws charging around 9 cents per GB and gcp 8 cents per GB. Profit margins for VPNs are actually extremely low.
Wrong, edit your comment to say "Who would have thought that (Some) vpn companies make money somehow other than doing illegal activity", because in this video you can see that it wasn't describing (All) free vpns.
@@mrbanana6464 INAP BW is as low as 0.000599875/GB. Your providers are robbing you. nfoservers, a very HQ and old provider of virtual and dedicated machines, offers 80TB for $47.
@@DanniDuck Lol. the kid is defending a corporation.
Proton vpn have a free tier. While nobody is 100% above reproach, they seem a bit more trustworthy than most.
I don't doubt there are some good free VPNs out there. But I imagine there aren't many
@@Seytonic I personally wouldn't trust just Proton for anything important due to the climate activist thing. There's a difference between being required to comply and waiting for an excuse to, for me they came off as way too willing to comply and make it easy for gov.
I expect them to sandbag the hell out of the gov requests.
@@dragonproductions236That’s an uninformed trash take if I have ever seen one 😂
@@RegrinderAlert "Noooo! They shouldn't make it hard for the state!!!" That's your entire argument.
@@dragonproductions236 So you are worried about your encrypted(!) unusable data blobs being given to the Swiss government in case of a Swiss warrant against you?
They should rather refuse, go to jail and close doors, right?
Wait what? Is this the first time I've ever heard someone not shill for VPN ad money on TH-cam? Props to you, theres so much fearmongering out there I'm glad someone at least gets it.
Have you never heard of Tom Scott?
@@Kongonaut
Eh. He's alright
@@Kongonaut didn't tom scott advertise one already?
@@TheoSaurRawrhe did but the reason he refused the sponsorship the first time was because he had a computer science background and realized the sponsorships were misleading
This has *been* happening, are ya new?
The EncrCchat "hack" has been very disputed.
It is believed in Sec circles that the police intercepted a large quantity of phones going to different people and putting in snoopers etc, and downloading keys etc etc.
And yes, it was a dumb idea to begin with, why not roll your own privacy phone? There are so many apps for that, that any product like this is just not viable to begin with.
There has also been speculation that the whole thing was an operation by different European Police agencies.
I'm not sure if hosting your privacy app on a retail Google/Apple phone can ever really be secure? The private keys must be stored locally on the phone somewhere, which the phone obviously has access to if the privacy app is specifically targeted by Google/Apple?
Building your own phone is one option, but very expensive, and you STILL have to trust 3rd parties to some extent (either software or hardware).
And I also have doubts that a security-focused org would keep un-encrypted messages for all these people in their DB with a since decryption key or some other lame method?
@@zdrux
You can flash your own android or other OS on a phone.
Running something like GNOME Mobile or KDE Mobile.
@@therealb888 ?????????????????
Yes and they started out whit this trying to catcth people like me buying drugs on the dark web years ago
I'll admit I'm out of the loop on EncroChat, but from what I've read on the topic, none of it seems to add up. It reeks of glow-in-the-dark.
VPNs aren't useless in Utah. They basically banned spicy sites for us.
That's false. The legislators demanded porn sites implement a real age verification system instead of just a checkbox that any kid can bypass. And the porn sites said no. Might I remind you we are talking about the same websites that profited from human trafficking and revenge porn.
hey i’m in utah rn ‼️
@@kavky Not justifying their actions but they literally sell porn.. and you're expecting them to conduct business ethically?
@@kavky The problem with any porn is that the image or video is not age verified. Can you tell the difference between an 18 year old girl and one 17. The latter image could get you 5 years in prison and worse. Plus what you think your clicking on may not be what you think it is. Many innocent people can easily be screwed but most people don't care if innocent people are sent to prison.
I have sensed over the years very deceptive ways they lure people in. These laws are dangerous not to mention the extreme draconian punishment aspect of these laws.
Underage children has been used by all the intelligence agencies to blackmail people. Congress has sanctioned the use of children in these operations.
If you have to decide between murdering someone or risk looking at porn, the former has way less risk. The politicians who made these laws should be sent to prison.
Politicians always claim they are making such laws to protect children yet look the other way when the state covertly uses them. The largest and only distributor of such porn in US is the government. It is sanctioned by US Congress. Most people who express outrage of such porn are two faced and stay very quiet when it involves their government.
Human trafficking is primarily supported by the governments all around the world behind the scenes. It's why it can't be stopped.
@@eballer48 No, I expect them to comply and be thankful we don't hang them from trees.
The 2008 hack of US Military systems was fixed with Operation Buckshot Yankee. An NSA led operation that hard lockdown US Military systems. The operation banned unapproved USB and external harddrives making it an UCMJ offense if you plugged an unauthorized one in, it also turned off the USB function for external drives on all computers. Needless to say, it placed all our operations in Iraq on a total pause for almost a week.
Also, the malware was aimed at scrapping all information and sending it to China, not Russia.
Starting these hacking news series was the best thing you could've done, I always watch everytime you upload one, I also just uninstalled the vpn I was using, did a little digging and reading into their tos and realized that they are using my data in nefaruous ways
Glad I could be of help, thanks for watching :)
These videos are so informative man, please keep it up! 👏
I appreciate your videos man. Also nice that you explain things like brushing for us plebs.
Love ur work bro, seriously the BEST tech security channel by far keep up the good work and more often if possible plz can’t get enough of it 👍
Thanks for watching my dude, I appreciate the support :)
You are a beast, been watching for a year or two now. I love how you bridge the line of explaining the hardcore stuff but for the most part, assume the viewer knows what's up, if that makes any sense. If you started a Patreon I'd defo donate, something I really never thought I'd ever do (seeing as you won't even shill a VPN I doubt you ever will lol)
and if you read this can you make a video on why VPNs are a joke? I don't use one mainly because I imagine i'm already a virtual meat puppet whose data is accessible regardless of the stopgaps. maybe a side channel or something where we can tap your knowledge. I can't think of another youtube channel that is as informative and curious yet normal and funny as yours you're a pimp
I enjoyed free VPNs when I was on iOS. And the thought of being a ddos slave is interesting.
Thanks for putting this into an easy to understand video to share to friends and family that don't follow this sort of news.
Ah shoot, here we go again. The prices on Alibaba are not set until the manager sends you an invoice. Video cards for 20 dollars and watches for 60 cents are just here to attract your attention. Most companies don’t update product cards. Different managers from the same company may offer varying prices and shipping options for the same item because they are competiting among themselves.
And something for 60 cents that is not possible to produce for that cheap without making a loss has to make money another way...
I'm sure they're in the business of selling data using shitwatches, they don't want to make a profit on shitwatches.
there is a spike in TOR usage in germany within the last day, by a huge factor, maybe you can check in on the topic
“A free vpn has a secret feature”
- well he ain’t wrong chief 😂
Bot
@@tottallynotkong fr I am a bot
Great video, keep them coming. Still playing with my Pwnagotchi. Thank you!
10:45 charge your phone! is all i could think haha, great vid, keep it up :)
I like the return to the 3 news stories in a video
I'm doing a mix, so I'll still be doing single topic videos for topics that're juicy enough.
Seytonic, thank you for the video. please have a great day!
I wonder how internet security became so costly to the point that people will try to scam you out of getting it for free
9:27 I find it kind of funny how this adds up to a perfect 100%, as if the only people using the phone are in one of these groups. That's obviously not the case, another perfect example of "simplifying" data down to lie about privacy related things.
It’s as official as WMD in Iraq.
maybe it just says percentage of crimes within the total amount of crime-related activites
@@qwardel7799 even then, these aren’t be the only categories of crime related activities on that platform
I'm sure there isn't anyone dumb enough to spend 2.600 usd on something they wouldn't use for a crime.
If true, big funny
10:32 “It’ll never seize to amaze me”, nice pun.
Worked in IT company that manages mobapp for one of Arabic airlines. At some point because of the scanners my company had a dispute with Airlines because scanners activity apart from using bandwidth also make request to pross and monthly cost of pros requests caused by scanners was over 100k$
I have to say, This video was a JUICY one as well as an EYEOPENER for lots of "NONE-TECH savy" humans. The cyber warfare game/reality is here friends. Most of it is always run from those in HIGH POWER. Never trust a book by it's cover. Stay safe and vigilant.
Most of it is just done by run of the mill criminals and that's where the danger for your average person lies. You shouldn't be worried about the NSA listening in on you, you should be worried about that video editing software you downloaded for free scooping up your passwords.
There are so many VPN services because it's dirt cheap and easy to set them up and scale as needed...
I myself could go online, rent a VM and turn it into a glorified proxy server we now call a VPN in 30 minutes and start renting the bandwidth further to others...
Just either use TOR or set up your own VPNs.
If you aren't the customer, you're the product.
Thx for returning to cyber news
love your videos :D
I would love to hear your input on the current paid VPNs. I still have and use one from PIA since I paid for a few years of service.
Mullvad and ProtonVPN are the best ones I have used so far.
He did say at one point that in his opinion VPNs are practically useless in general
The only way to really go about this shit us reputation, really. You never know what’s going on under the hood. If you don’t get inside the candy man’s van when he invites you, why to would you believe a company when they just claim they are safe?
Just common sense, but I feel like people need to hear this.
So, if going by reputation, Mullvad, Airvpn and IVPN are technically the most scandal free and popular enough for that argument to stick.
@@user-cx6ec2kp6uthey are basically only good for pirating. If you want to stay anonymous you use TOR
i get a free VPN, using when strictly needed, but if you're paying for one...at that point just get PFsense on a laptop and whip up your own VPN - hell pay someone you trust the same amount as you're paying a VPN to set it up for you.
Otherwise, again, they're entirely useless unless you literally own the VPN yourself tbh.
hey, epic content bro 👍
For now proton vpn is the only one to trust as free vpn service
Same here. Open-source but can't see backend. Possible honeypot, but I trust them 95%.
@@darukutsusame
@@darukutsuI don’t think you understand what “honeypot” means. It’s a controlled system to lure cyber criminals, nothing to do with regular end users.
@@rbt-0007 How do you call when something pretend to be something just to lure users to connect to service? Masquarade? I don't think this fits here well.
"If it's free you are the product"
"Download signal for free"
last time I was this early to a seytonic video, 1337 speak was still cool
You would think government or military personnel would be immediately suspicious of any electronics that showed up for free and was never ordered….instead of saying “sweet free shit, let’s fire it up”
About the Swing VPN: I tested the new version of it using the exact same thing that you used, and now its basically requesting to random websites, like some applovin thing, supersonicads,rayjump, and wayyy more. Good thing that my wifi is not metered.
Love binging your channel
"Free VPN" is such a hilarious statement. Who could've foretold that you are the product? Nobody!
great work dude
the smartwatches may also be being used for Troop tracking, connecting to their phones gps via a fitness app to monitor their daily routines, which bases they're stationed at, and deployment.
gone are the days when a spy-plane needs to fly overhead taking photographs
really cool seeing the research for free VPNs
If Russia is dropping USB sticks in parking lots, could plugging it in be called Russian Roulette?
Well, HolaVPN is a front for the Luminati residential proxy botnet, but that's old news.
There is a government agency somewhere in the world that isn’t happy with this exposure 😢
God, this channel is awesome.
:D
props for not selling your credibility for VPN adds ;)
smartwatches... in 2018, researchers identified some CIA black sites based on Strava user activity heat maps. I can easily imagine that sending smart watches to the US military could be a PRC operation to create similar such information without the hassle of having to extract the info from Strava first.
I find it really difficult to believe that soldiers today don't receive briefings on good security practices. But then I grew up an Army brat during the Cold War, and even as a kid would've been really suspicious of getting a free, brand new wireless phone unsolicited and from an unknown sender. My parents would've had it investigated rather than keeping it in the house for a day.
In Ukraine, pretty sure some foreign legion soldiers had to be taught not to take photos or do tik tok.
I often use a VPN, but not for privacy. But to play region-locked games instead.
i think this is happening with many apps. this looks easy to implement.
I used to wonder why my data usage spikes up massively, and everything loads slowly, when I use a free VPN from the playstore, now I know exactly why.
Thank you
the most startling thing about this video is the numbers from the academic analysis of free vpns: *only* 36% contained malware? i sincerely thought it would be nigh upon 100%. startling, indeed
Owh, that's only the stuff that didn't pass the av test, it's 100% for sure.
I guess the takeaway is, if you don't wanna get caught, just don't commit crime
Boosting the algorithm by engaging
thank you for the video
I just went there and is true, people are still unaware of this.
Honestly, I use ProtonVPN when actually needed (not just for privacy.) Im a broke college student and I dont have money for a paid VPN or what it would cost not to use one.
same, i only use proton when i want to acess region locked content
7:13 I mean hey at least you didn’t see a vape with a usb stick in a local grocery store
this is why you always check the lowest reviews on shit first they are usually the most accurate.
To be fair, I'd be willing to play dumb about my VPN DDOSing a site if the VPN actually kept my real browsing info private
That's a lofty expectation for a VPN botnet. I'd rather pay the $5 to $10 from a FED-checked VPN.
You clearly don't know how VPNs work.
It encrypts the connection, it doesn't stop X from seeing that you mase a connection to Y.
@@FirstLast-fl7mo especially if you are connected to a google account.
@@FirstLast-fl7mo 99% of your web activity is already encrypted thru https, the advantages of using a vpn is to hide what site you are visiting to your internet provider and to spoof your location and IP.
And by using a vpn you in fact allow a middleman attack by the vpn provider to mess with your https encryption.
@@FirstLast-fl7moIt can, by encrypting DNS requests. There aren't many VPN's doing it tho (especially free ones).
All the dodgy secure messaging app falls into law enforcement's hands stories really grind my gears. Imagine the police had a warrant against a post office - would they get to read everyone's mail? Pardon my ignorance here, it just seems like there's something wrong with this picture.
Yes, they can hijack the post office as well.
They already do lol
US Post offices are literally constitutionally owned by congress.
The Congress shall have Power [...] to establish Post Offices and post Roads
you my friend, are very out of touch with reality😂
If they have the warrant yes. Because they need to be able to determine if something is relevant evidence.
That is crazy information behind these attacks. And I am so tired of the VPN ads, sometime I think the adds are just honey pots for non-tech usrs.
I don’t see why Signal would be more secure. There are plenty of opportunities for the app to be modified between the source code and downloading it from the App Store. Plus, there is no way to verify that it is actually end to end encrypted without seeing the source code that is being used to build the production app for the app stores. At the end of the day you have to trust a developer who is shipping it to the App Store, which is obviously somebody who can be compromised.
Good video
What shocks me the most about criminals using messaging apps is that they don’t make there own with a little engineering they can develop there own system that they can be sure is secure
The Mexican cartel actually did build their own cell network. The problem is just that if you make something yourself it's likely to be very obvious and noticed by law enforcement, and if you're a criminal doing it you probably have to hire other criminals to build it for you and there's no way of knowing that they won't just screw you over. It's not like they can get an actual legit company to do this because if a legit company is in this space already they probably have their own product out already and see no point in risking their reputation and potentially diluting market share.
i'm betting that free vpns provide the ip addresses for most web scraping services. when you said swing vpn was searching for flights, my first thought was that it was getting data for a flight comparison site.
Read the title, thought about it, had a good laugh
If the company doesn't have any visible consistent sources of revenue, chances are the products they make are designed to utilize sketchy techniques for other means of revenue.
What are your thoughts on ProtonVPN? The company seems trustworthy, and they have a paid version of the vpn, meaning they have a way of monetizing.
Does that mean all the people who downloaded the app broke the law?
In a interesting side of matters, technically yes
you're always breaking some sort of obscure law it's just a matter of if feds want to get you for it
I use proton vpn! It's free (at least for me) you get to choose fastsst server for the vpn, and i typically press connect once, which gets me to another server in the u.s, but if i press change server it sends me to the netherlands! And it's open source as well!
Time to generate some engagement for a person who doesn't run adds for things they don't believe in. Thank you, you're real cool)
Ik this is stolen but I can’t be bothered to think of a good comment
Who in the hersheys chocolate bars are planning plane trips through a free vpn
There's ONE VPN service I've been using since 2016 or so and thats hide me (mostly on PC). It's premium with a limited free plan. In this case, the income is premium users, as the free plan is limited to WAY fewer locations with a hard data cap, after which you end up on slower (depending on current load/time) free servers with fair use.
I just don't use a VPN service enough for it to be worth a subscription but that's just me.
Attacking Turkmenistan airlines caught me off guard. But it makes sense, their ticket searching was extremely slow
**sweating and staring at my Tomato VPN**
Ah damn. I used one to wartch the world cup and haven't uninstalled it since. No wonder my home data has been under heavier use
If you want a VPN, host one yourself, buy a VPS for 10 bucks a year and host watever you want on it, VPN, proxy, tiny web server.
I had no use for a VPN before, but DDosing Turkmenistan's Government... that's pretty tempting!
3 weeks after you uploaded this video, the app is still on the Google Play Store.
I will edit this comment accordingly.
Encrochat's story is a few years old already. And it wasn't hacked, it was a honeypod to begin with
What do you think about v-ray(v project)?
or wireguard and that kind?
there's many free vpn service for that.
Honestly…. If paying for a free VPN in exchange for using like 1% of my bandwidth for a botnet? I’m all about it
I honestly feel like it's only fair to be part of a botnet if the app works 😅, it's not even like that would be a huge data usage in the network since it's a request every 10 seconds. The only issue for me is that this fact wasn't made clear from the start...
finaly a long saytonic video gain
One question, if i am connected to the vpn i am connected to the vpn servers, so if a request is made from my client app will that not be from the servers instead if from my ip. Also taking in consideration that most free VPNs have only a few servers which will make it easy to be caught right? Hmm strange i guess 😢
here's your viewer engagement point
I used Proton VPN, but now I SELF host VPN on my remote server using Wireguard protocol using PiVPN
Next episode, Russian soldiers are given free airpods
The fact is that a big portion of VPN´s are created and operated by the world's clandestine entities, tells a story...