TechCrunch Host
speaker
5,755 appearances
109 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 17 Aug
TechCrunch Host’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 109 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 23.
Appearances
Anytime a ResProxy app or device connects to the internet, an outsider can also pay to use it.
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ResProxies are not inherently illegal.
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Some are used for evading censorship by routing internet traffic through ordinary-looking residential homes.
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AI companies, for example, increasingly rely on ResProxies to scrape data from multiple places on the internet in one go to train their AI models.
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But cybersecurity companies say resproxies have gained a reputation for allowing hackers and spies to carry out cyberattacks and data breaches while hiding their malicious activity.
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Now, cybersecurity companies find resproxies challenging to tackle because the network traffic looks like it's coming from an ordinary household rather than a malicious hacker located overseas, as they might expect.
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Moreover, the network traffic that flows through a user's device over REST proxies is generally encrypted, which is generally impossible to unscramble and inspect.
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By routing a Samsung Smart TV's software, mnemonics sand gained deep access to the television's internals and analyzed all of the network traffic that flowed in and out of the TV.
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This included any app that was sharing the smart TV's internet connection with someone else.
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He found the Pac-Man game contained ResProxy code from Bright Data, an Israel-based company that provides proxy networks touting access to millions of residential networks around the world.
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The company also has a marketplace for selling access to scraped datasets.
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These datasets are derived from a network of enlisted smart TVs as exit nodes, which are used to download large amounts of public data from the web from multiple sources at once, often to circumvent systems designed to prevent scraping.
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Now, Sand found that Bright Data's ResProxy code loaded when opening the Pac-Man game, but...
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He said that this did not automatically turn the Samsung Smart TV into an exit node.
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Sands said that the res proxy code is dormant until the user accepts a consent screen, which immediately activates the res proxy code to run in the background until the user deletes the app.
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Aside from the user themselves consenting to enlisting their device into a res proxy,
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Sand warned that a simple code change on a web server could instantly activate hundreds of millions of smart TVs into a potentially malicious botnet.
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With access to the network data flowing through his smart TV, Sand could see that much of it appeared to suggest the ResProxy network was used for large-scale scraping of LinkedIn profiles and for collecting AI training data.
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Sand said he only saw a tiny percentage of what was routed over Bright Data's network.
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That's all for now.
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Showing 541–560 of 5,755 · page 28 of 288
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