Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users' internet connections with strangers

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.

Ah, yes. Overseas, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, home of all malicious hackers and utterly devoid of any ordinary households.

Let me guess, you’ve never tried to host anything public yourself. If you run fail2ban long enough you end up with a blocklist that heavily skews towards a particular set of countries. Residential proxies are regularly used in criminal activity. I’ve personally and professionally been impacted by TAs using residential proxies to get around firewall rules as part of compromises.

If authorities in those countries took action against TAs and scammers more aggressively, perhaps blocking their entire country wouldn’t be seen as a valid defensive approach.

You do understand that ‘overseas’ means ‘anywhere not in my country’, correct? Not a few specific countries, but literally 90+% of the world, with the exact makeup of that 90% depending on where the company is.

Overseas is generally used for “across an ocean”. As this is an NA based publication, “overseas” would likely be Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania.

Malicious traffic frequently originates from at least one place in every one of those continents. We were breached some time ago by a TA using a residential proxy to send traffic from a Ukr AS block that got around our firewall. Blocking all traffic from regions of the world that you have no intention of servicing is a very valid cybersecurity layer. Getting annoyed because someone used the phrase “overseas” to describe areas to be suspicious of I think is rather short sighted from a security point of view.

Very few cyber attacks come from domestic/near domestic sources, except from botnets and residential proxies. The world will not miss residential proxies.

Blocking all traffic from regions of the world that you have no intention of servicing is a very valid cybersecurity layer.

I pretty regularly run into things that block access or make me complete captchas while I’m traveling. I may not be in a region you intend to service, but I’m (possibly) from a region you intend to service. Airplanes are a thing.

Buying access to a residential proxy to deal with that situation would be an extreme step for most people, but as a cybersecurity practice, it’s problematic.

Man I’m replying while visiting family in a non-western aligned occupied territory “overseas” to NA. I know. I region block anyways and VPN into Europe/NA when needed, where at least my traffic originates from a VPN’S AS where someone can be made to revoke my access if I abuse it.

You have experienced the problem and you do it anyway?

Services that do region blocking also tend to block public VPNs. Breaking the internet like this is bad, and you should feel bad for doing it.

Tell that to the guy in Lagos I had to report a few years ago for breaching one of my personal services. Nigerian Police have a dedicated Cybercrime division and they didn’t even reply to my report through their official channels. Sorry, but Nigeria went on the geoblocklist! I have a right to not expose myself to undue risk.

Sure, you have the right to manage your servers however you like… and I have the right to unfairly use you as a proxy for my rage at everyone who has ever broken the Internet’s global nature to make their server log files a little less noisy.