Someone in my household uses Hola as a VPN and I have just found out they are selling users’ bandwidth to botnets. Does the fact that someone on my home WiFi network is using a VPN mean that my information is also compromised?
Not necessarily. In this case no.
A VPN is something that layers on top of the “physical” connection (wireless/wifi, wired ethernet) and the basic internet protocols (TCP/IP).
So while someone in your house has been using Hola, you by default are not. Unless they’ve installed Hola on your computer without you being aware of it.
Assuming not, the only impact to you and your computer might be if the Hola botnet has been seeking out other computers to launch malware at, in which case I’d run an antivirus and malware scan on your computer just be sure. An uninfected computer (i.e. yours) on the same home network as the Hola source would be an easy target.
Just to be clear: I have not studied how Hola works, this reply is entirely based on the wording in the recent news about Hola “selling your bandwidth” to botnets, and what I think it most likely means.
Hola is afaik a software VPN. I.e. a program you install on your computer. Unlike a VPN-enabled router, this means it is only traffic from that computer that is tunneled. Any data from other computers on the local network is not affected.
If the router itself was configured with VPN which would be the case if Hola were hardware based (or possibly a box patched in between the router and your wall jacket), then all traffic from your network would get tunneled.
So assuming Hola is software-based (and no other virus/malware/net-scan chenanigans are at play) your computer and everything on it is perfectly safe. Only the data on the computer running Hola is at risk.
However, your computer do share one thing with the other at risk one. The Internet subscription (which has your name on it maybe?) and its bandwidth. If you got a 10MBit connection, that is the most you two combined can use at any time. Any bandwidth used by Hola is bandwidth you can’t use!
What IS probably happening is that Hola secretly installed botnet-software on the at risk computer. These programs are fully automated and talk to other computers running the same software, forming a network of their own. Hence the name Botnet (Robot Network). Normally they are mostly dormant so you don’t notice their presence.
Until they receive an order from the botnet owner. This could be for instance to send as much junk data to a specific IP as much and as fast as possible. Then all these computers in the network flood one poor server, sinking it. This is what is called a DDOS attack. A Distributed (typically across a botnet) Denial Of Service attack.
How does all that affect you? Well, during that attack, Hola will essentially steal all your internet. It will hog every last bit. You will see your internet slow to a crawl.
Also, your IP, your internet subscription, has now participated in an attack on someone. Often someone big, like a bank, or a government. If they start trying to find out who dunnit when their website goes down, they’d eventually end up at your door.
Hopefully by that time they’d have already realized it was a botnet, full on unsuspecting victims and not thousands of smalltime cyberterrorists working in unison, but still not exactly what you want to be involved in.
Another more common thing botnets do is to share the burden of sending out all those billions of spam emails that get send each day. Again, that would be your bandwidth that you pay monthly for that is used.
This is actually probably worse for you. If your connection sends tons of spam, it will be your IP people complain about when they “report spam”, and if enough people do that, your ISP might disconnect you for breaking their TOS.
So it layers onto my modem/router/whatever its called or onto the connection from a device to that thing? How would they put malware on another computer just by being connected to the same network?
I think what I mean to ask is how exactly my computer can be accessed (to launch malware) simply through my home wifi
Thank you for your in-depth explanation of this and for keeping it at a level I can understand. I have no idea how to make this “resolved” on mobile, but for the time being, in order to keep some discussion, I think I’ll leave this up!
I don’t think the Hola VPN is setup up to replicate itself. its simply a botnet transport for other softwares. As you have to install Hola intentionally.
Scanning for other computers/devices on the same home network is easy (basically query each IP address in a range set by your network configuration - all computers, phones, tablets on your home network will have very similar IP addresses: 192.168.1.10, 192.168.1.11, 192.168.1.12 etc.)
There are always known exploits and vulnerabilities in most operating systems, Windows, Mac, even droid and iphone/pad. If someone knows how to exploit these, they can gain superuser/administrative privlidges on the target device and that lets them do whatever they want including installing new software that they can control.
Now, before you freak out, the chances of this happening to your computer are relatively minimal - the software being run by Hola has to be specifically designed for this activity. Probably not, most likely some spam email sending program (those are most lucrative).
But just to be save, run an antivirus and malware scan on your computer and you should be fine.