VPN service Hola sells bandwidth users
VPN service Hola sells users’ bandwidth to third parties, who can use it at their own discretion. This came out after the 8Chan website received a ddos attack from a ‘botnet’ of Hola users.
The founder of the service Hola, which is popular as a Chrome and Firefox extension, among other things, confirms to various media, including Torrentfreak and Motherboard, that it offers users’ bandwidth as exit nodes for a VPN service for sale. Although Hola says it has always been transparent about this, Hola has recently adjusted the text on its own site. According to Web Archive, the answer to the question ‘is Hola free’ on March 27 was different than now.
Although the old text states that Hola uses users’ devices as peers, the new text makes that much clearer and also states that users make ‘idle resources’ available to the Hola network.
Hola sells the bandwidth through the Luminati.io site, which claims to have the largest pool of VPN users in the world. Meanwhile, Hola’s faq also mentions the Luminati site. By deploying users as exit nodes, users can inadvertently tunnel traffic containing illegal activities with their device. The ball started rolling after a report from 8Chan on its own website earlier this week.