Proxy Services Feast on Ukraine’s IP Address Exodus
1 min read
Summary
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, around 20% of the country’s internet space has come under Russian control or been sold to internet address brokers.
Large sections of Ukrainian IPv4 address space are now in the hands of proxy and anonymity services, which are nested in some of the USA’s major internet service providers (ISPs).
Ukraine’s largest ISP, Ukrtelecom, now routes just 29% of the IPv4 address ranges that it controlled at the beginning of the war, according to analysis by Kentik.
Most of the company’s former IP space has been sold to global providers including Amazon, AT&T and Cogent.
Although proxy and anonymity services are often used for legitimate purposes such as price comparisons, they can also be abused for hiding cybercriminal activity.
Intelligence experts have recently sanctioned an ISP, Stark Industries Solutions, which has become a source of large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and spear-phishing attempts by Russian-sponsored hacking groups.