Uninstall Hola From Your Computers Immediately

San Francisco, CA, February 15, 2016 (Newswire.com) - Hola may look like it is a freemium web and mobile application, which claims to provide a faster, private and more secure Internet, but the real truth is still hidden from the users.

Superfish was an advertising company that developed various advertising-supported software products and Hola is one of them. Superfish was founded in Israel and so is Hola. As of 2014, Superfish products had over 80 million users and it was just the right time for them to bring Hola into action under a new name of Luminati. Hola uses a sophisticated system to offer its services for free. Instead of routing users solely (or at all) through company servers and raking up huge bandwidth bills in the process, it is utilizing user devices as endpoints. This means basically that any user device that Hola is running on acts as an endpoint. An endpoint is a node that is communicating directly with a target website or service that Hola users access when the service is enabled.

You might know it as a free VPN or "unblocker", but in reality it operates like a poorly secured botnet - with serious consequences.

Darwin James, CEO

In 2014, WindowShopper (product of Superfish) a browser add-on for desktop and mobile devices, which forced users who hover over browser images and be directed to shopping Web sites to purchase similar products had approximately 100 million monthly victims and it was the right time for them (Hola Networks) to began selling access to its huge userbase (collected from the add-on WindowShopper) as exit nodes, under the name Luminati. They charge $12.5 per gigabyte for bandwidth that is actually coming from their VPN users—they do not pay for the bandwidth at all. Every Hola user is actually functioning as an exit node in a huge botnet.

The founder of Superfish already knew that Superfish wouldn’t last longer in the market as they were already going towards the darknet side of the Internet. Hola and Luminati were their backup plan, which is till now hidden from the public. Hola is using your bandwidth without your permission and earning a handsome amount of money from it without even investing anything. They say that they provide bandwidth from their own servers but they DO NOT!

Hola users have no control over endpoints, which is problematic for several reasons. First, it increases the bandwidth usage on the device and reveals your device's IP address to the target service or website which you may not always want which for sure means that you are not at all secure on Hola Network.

This means: if you are using Hola, your connection may be used as an endpoint not only by other Hola users who try to access sites in the country you are in, but may also be sold to individuals and companies who may use it for questionable or outright illegal activities.

Google should look into Superfish and Microsoft policy in removing these bots and remove hola plugin from Google Chrome.