A residential proxy botnet is a group of compromised devices that relay internet traffic through ordinary consumer connections, making the traffic appear to come from real homes instead of data centers or known attacker infrastructure. The infected devices may be phones, routers, PCs, IoT gear, or embedded systems that can run proxy software in the background.
This matters because residential IPs are harder to block and can bypass simple reputation checks, geofencing, and fraud filters. Attackers use these botnets to hide scanning, credential stuffing, scraping, ad fraud, and other abuse behind “normal” network origins. Defenders look for unusual proxy processes, unexpected outbound connections, high traffic volume from low-power devices, and repeated use of the same consumer IPs for many sessions. Strong patching, trusted update mechanisms, device hardening, and network monitoring reduce the chance that a device can be recruited into proxy infrastructure.