Google and FBI Shut Down Malicious Residential Proxy Network Installed in Millions of Smart Devices

General News
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Google, Lumen, and the FBI have worked in lockstep to disrupt the massive malicious residential proxy network NetNut, also known as Popa, that has its claws in millions of devices.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/07/07/google-and-fbi-shut-down-malicious-residential-proxy-network-installed-in-millions-of-smart-devices/
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Best NetNut alternatives?

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Really just don’t use residential proxies.

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I doubt there’s any truly ethical ones, but I’m sure there’s no shortage of options.

There’s definitely mainstream ones that aren’t criminal, although they should be.

SMSPool resells some from someone.

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Most community-powered VPNs or proxy services don’t properly inform users that their devices can be used as exit nodes.

But they still have high demand because VPN IPs are mostly data center IPs that are easily blocked by some services. Web scraping is mostly done using residential proxies to avoid bans & captchas. Security researchers also prefer residential proxies to test endpoints.

Looks like they initially seized the wrong domain hehe

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