What is a residential proxy?
A residential proxy routes traffic through a real consumer device or home network — often without the device owner's knowledge — rather than a data center server, making the traffic look like it comes from an ordinary home internet connection. See our blog posts "What is a Residential Proxy?" and "Residential Proxies: The Legal Botnet Nobody Talks About" for more detail.
Similar questions
How does Spur classify infrastructure that serves more than one purpose, such as a legitimate corporate network also exposed through a public VPN service?
Spur classifies based on the most security-relevant observable behavior, not the primary or most benign use case. If otherwise-legitimate infrastructure is being publicly exposed through anonymizing or proxy services, it's labeled according to that exposure, since that's the behavior most relevant to a security decision.
What Proxy or VPN services are known bad?
Some services tend to be more abuse than others. It is important to remember that because abuse is ultimately driven by the users of a service, this can ebb and flow depending on different threat actors, techniques, and targets. We recommend looking for services that explicitly enable anonymous purchases without logging and services that are frequently sourced by malware.
Can a single IP address be associated with more than one proxy or anonymization service?
Yes. Shared infrastructure, reseller arrangements, and overlapping proxy ecosystems can result in an IP being associated with multiple services. Determining the exact service responsible for a specific event often requires additional context and investigation.
How quickly can Spur identify and classify newly discovered VPN or proxy infrastructure?
Spur continuously researches emerging infrastructure and updates classifications as new intelligence becomes available. New infrastructure is often identified and incorporated rapidly, allowing customers to benefit from current intelligence through the API and data products.
How does Spur detect VPNs, residential proxies, and ISP proxies?
Spur classifies an IP from the activity it observes on it, not from who owns the IP. It combines several kinds of evidence, including infrastructure and routing data, behavior over time, and ongoing research into VPN and proxy services, and evaluates them together to decide whether an IP belongs to a VPN, residential proxy network, ISP proxy, hosting provider, or other category.
Related guides & explainers
Why Residential Proxy Classifications Can Appear on Legitimate Infrastructure
Residential proxy networks recruit real consumer devices to relay traffic, so a legitimate ISP's own IP ranges can show a residential-proxy classification without the ISP's knowledge or involvement.
Entrance IPs vs. Exit IPs for Anonymizing Tunnels
Some anonymizing tunnel configurations route through shared infrastructure, like Cloudflare, before reaching the tunnel operator's own exit point. Here's why blocking the entrance IP can affect unrelated legitimate traffic, and what to enforce on instead.
What "Client Proxies" Means in Spur Data
"Client Proxies" in Spur data describes proxy-network activity Spur observed coming from an IP — it does not mean the IP is owned or operated by the listed provider.
Anonymizing vs. Non-Anonymizing Tunnels: What the "anonymous" Flag Means
Not every tunnel Spur detects is built to anonymize. The tunnels object's anonymous flag distinguishes corporate/ZTNA infrastructure from services designed to obscure a user's origin.