detecting users with hola extension

Question

I want to know if users are using hola better internet to browse my site. Hola! is an extension that uses a peer to peer network so users can appear to be browsing from different countries. I am worried however that some bots are using this plugin as a proxy. From what I read it does not send the X-FORWARDED-FOR header, and does not seem to announce itself on the navigator.plugins - verified with panopticlick. This seems like a huge security issue, as this plugin has 42 million users..

I see people using it to see netflix from other countries, I guess they would love to stop it too.

How do I detect users who are using this plugin?

--EDIT--

Also, see this - luminati.io - what seems to be the worlds largest botnet for hire... i cant see how they wont piss off google like this. But this does look like a great security risk to any site on the web.

hey, so any solution to detect Luminati? This seems to be an idea for a startup "Luminati detector" — Toolkit, Nov 08 '18 at 07:43

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 05 '15 at 15:13

Looking at the source code of the plugin there is this:

function hola_ext_present(){
    // Only <html> is present at document_start time, use it as a
    // storage to communicate presence of extension to web page.
    document.documentElement.setAttribute('hola_ext_present', 'true');
}

so basically something like:

document.documentElement.getAttribute('hola_ext_present');

will tell you if it is present or not.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 04 '15 at 18:41

2

I know this should be done on server side, but what I can think for now is doing it on the client side since hola when successfully loaded it creates an attribute on html tag named hola_ext_inject.

So using jquery :

$(function() {
  var hola_inject = $('html').attr('hola_ext_inject');
  if (typeof hola_inject !== typeof undefined && hola_inject !== false) {
    console.log('plugin exist');
  }
});

answered May 04 '15 at 18:41

Robin Carlo Catacutan

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The thing is that hola apparently tried at one point to monetize their user base with ad injections, which is pretty shady. They have stopped it due to users uninstalling, and are now doing something far more shady, which will probably backfire again IMO. – WeaselFox May 05 '15 at 14:03

detecting users with hola extension

2 Answers2