What's wrong with open proxies (free proxies!)?
Free proxies are widely available all around the net nowadays and one has to wonder how such a high bandwidth-consuming service procreates the necessary capital to be able to run freely, to literally thousands or even more. The sad truth is that they are not really free, because most of the sites that scan for open proxies have them listed merely for a day or so before such a system is then declared as not open.
What actually happens is that these proxies are normal proxies that were just set up insecurely by accident and they are resolved in no time. An open proxy is by definition a proxy that doesn't require a username and password to log on. The folks that do host these intentionally are either one of a.) Government related honeypots or b.) so-called hackers or information "spoofers".
The reality
So technically having an open proxy is not such a good idea after all, I mean it's a great paradox if you think of it; you use it for enhanced security and discretion but in the meanwhile your personal information is compromised. May I add, these guys can log everything from your web browsing, to your chat logs and every little protocol you accessed via their proxy. Kids these days...they think it's fun setting up a such a proxy at their school or university, sure as hell they're not the ones paying for the bandwidth.
And then the "hackers"
Oh yes! Most probably one of the most squandered words on the internet today, unfortunately people don't understand the term really. It's such a shame. Anyway, some people think it's wise and fun to use these freely available proxies for malicious tasks, compromising other users' systems and stealing information.
Crackers is what these people are actually. The big unfortunate deal is that cracking is not such an art as what it used to be, this is because information is very freely available on the internet today. All a hacker needs to do is to put a proxy server up on his, or a victim's computer and wait for a few hours for a scanner to find it. Within a day or two it is on a public list and his packet sniffer is working overtime collecting users credit card numbers, passwords and other personal information.
Erroneously these poor folks often fall into traps, which leads me to my next topic, honeypots.
What are honeypots and what do they serve for?
A honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect or in some manner counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems. So in essence,
they are deliberately insecure and a honeypot that appears as an open proxy is a sugarcane. There are many forms
of these, they are most commonly computers but can also be data records or just unused IP addresses in some cases.
Government branches set up honeypots to attract hackers and these systems have information that appear to be worthy the effort to try and consolidate. Everything done through these systems are traced, so the poor cracker fellas often find themselves in a dilemma, since the " hacker" then becomes the "hacked". All passwords are sniffed and logged as well as any other action. Honeypots are used as a research tool to study the attacker's preferred targets and how they plan on gaining access and what are their favourite methods to attack.
The moral of the story
Don't be stupid, don't use free proxies, they are open. Heck, they even get you banned and you never know who's the host of the proxy you're using. Besides, the public lists of open proxies don't care if you get in trouble while using them and using an unauthorised server could be a class II felony.
Proxies are fun, but rather shove up the extra buck and get a decent host or live without them. It's by far safer than any free proxy would be in any case.