Hola VPN sells YOUR bandwidth – remove now!

Users of Hola VPN are justifiably angry and surprised to learn that their bandwidth has been sold
under the guise of a service called Luminati (which Hola owns). It’s not easy to think of a legitimate use or reason for a business to want to purchase Luminati’s multiple user connections, especially without the users’ knowledge but it does seem to be a perfect, although downright illegitimate, ‘botnet-for-hire’. A botnet is a network of computers which can be used for illegal reasons, such as targeting businesses with a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, without the owner’s knowledge, and is powerful enough to bring down even the biggest websites! Just look at what one can do to companies like Sony and Microsoft.


The botnet issue was recently raised by 8chan founder, Fredrick Brennan, who claimed that an attack on his website could be traced back to computers on the Luminati network.
Hola VPN is actually a peer-to-peer (P2P) VPN service which is able to provide its services for nothing by selling Hola users’ bandwidth. However, this leaves the door wide open to spam, malware and potential unscrupulous third parties accessing Hola VPN users’ connections and use it for illegal activities, with the user having no clue as to what is going on.

A group of researchers and coders from Adios-Hola said on their website ”Hola is a ‘peer-to-peer’ VPN. This may sound nice, but what it actually means is that other people browse the web through your internet connection, similar to the way Tor works. To a website, it seems like it’s you browsing the site… imagine that somebody uploaded child pornography through your connection, for example. To everybody else, it seems as if it was your computer that did it, and you can’t really prove otherwise.”

The Adios researchers also found a number of serious security flaws with Hola VPN. Hola claim that they fixed “two vulnerabilities” but Adios-Hola found that “The vulnerabilities are *still* there, they just broke our vulnerability checker and exploit demonstration. Not only that; there weren’t two vulnerabilities, there were six.”
But that’s not all! According to Adios-Hola “…on some systems, it gets worse; Hola will happily run whatever you feed it as the ‘SYSTEM’ user. What this means in simple terms, is that somebody can completely compromise your system, beyond any repair. It allows for installing things like a rootkit, for example.”

In a bid to reassure around 9.7 million users of its free VPN, Hola quickly updated their FAQ’s to ensure that their users (if they have any left), are fully aware that their free VPN service is actually a P2P program.

“We assumed that by stating that Hola is a P2P network, it was clear that people were sharing their bandwidth with the community network in return for their free service. After all, people have been doing that for years with services like Skype. It was not clear to all our users, and we want it to be completely clear.”

The problem here is that their users weren’t aware that Hola VPN were selling users’ bandwidth and, more worryingly, Luminati / Hola didn’t seem to check or care what people were using it for.
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product!”, as they say.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch!
When we subscribe to any ‘free’ service, we have to ask ourselves, why is it free? What is the company getting out of this? Companies very rarely give us something for free out of the goodness of their hearts. In this digital age, we’re often giving away our personal data in exchange for products or services or to save money on health insurance – and in this case, Hola VPN users are giving away their right to privacy and security which could be used against them by criminals and other third parties.

Hola VPN are now looking to employ a Chief Security Officer… yep – good idea!
Is it really worth comprising your security and privacy for free VPN?

We at Hide My Ass! Pro VPN take your security and privacy extremely seriously – it’s what we do. We have VPN servers in over 190 countries around the world allowing you to safely, and securely surf the net anonymously, evade hackers and access your favourite sites and services around the world, for as little as $6.55 per month.


If you use Hola free VPN, will you continue to do so?

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