NSOCKS: Insights into a Million-Dollar Residential Proxy Service

When an adversary wants to target an organization, they want to make it look like they’re coming from a regional or local internet service provider. This makes their activity seem more legitimate and buys time until they get caught. Proxies, which adversaries can use to conceal the origin of malicious traffic, are essential to this process.

NSOCKS is a residential proxy provider that CrowdStrike researchers dug into to learn more about how it was constructed and proactively identify how adversaries were using it to mask their attacks. They found that a range of internet of things (IoT) devices, such as home routers and network-attached storage (NAS) devices, are targeted by proxy providers to build out infrastructure and provide access to residential internet connections. Many of these devices have basic misconfiguration issues that make them accessible to attackers, but the CrowdStrike team was also able to identify a range of zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities being used.  

Joel Snape, Senior Security Researcher at CrowdStrike, is part of that team. In this episode, Joel and Adam get into the details of the researchers’ findings, from how NSOCKS works to its takedown in late 2024 and the steps listeners can take to identify suspicious activity on their networks. Joel has presented this research at multiple security conferences — and now he brings it to the Adversary Universe podcast.