The brief says bulletproof proxy vendors now widely sell residential IP pools as breaches and stolen credentials rise. While proxies can help bypass geoblocks, support anonymous communication, or test geo-specific experiences, they are often used for account takeover, fake accounts, scraping, and API abuse. Comparing two vendors found about 34% overlap across 22,000 North American IPs, with 88% of overlapping IPs owned by Cogent, and all overlapping IPs tied only to malicious ATO traffic. In retail, web attacks dominated; in financial services, mobile API targeting dominated. The report argues blocking is defensible: <0.8% of overlapping IPs ever appeared in good traffic over a 4-month peak season window, and the worst-case observed was 4% over a year.

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