Hola Free VPN Connects Users to Botnet

Hola Free VPN Botnet

Hola free VPN is a free VPN service allowing users around the world to bypass geoblocking. Apparently Ltd Hola is a part of Luminati.io. Luminati’s anonymity network is a Peer to Peer network through which consumers browse the web anonymously by routing their requests through other Luminati users. The Luminati network has grown to millions of nodes and is rapidly growing larger. It is advertised as a “anonymity network for web crawlers”.

Attack on 8Chan

On May 24 of 2015 Luminati was used as a botnet in order to initate a DDoS attack against imageboard network 8Chan and due to “7 day free trial” service offered by luminati any hacker can use Hola API to take advantage of a literally free botnet. As well as lots of companies use rate limiters in order to protect there networks from DoS, they will be literally unable to counter such level of Distributed Denial of Service attack.

Chat screenshot:

botnet attack on 4chan
botnet attack on 8chan

2 thoughts on “Hola Free VPN Connects Users to Botnet

    1. I saw somewhere (gizmodo?) that a lot of users are reportedly being blocked by Google because of this. I expect other people have similar ideas of for SEO and are just burning out hola’s customers IPs.

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