The White House is apparently a popular residential proxy exit spot

Whether through malware or other means, devices associated with the White House network appear to be serving as residential proxy exit nodes, potentially posing security risks to one of the world's most sensitive networks.

News of the security snafu comes from security firm Layer3 Intel, which reported this week that it discovered the likely illicit activity thanks to its recently launched Residential Proxy Observatory. According to Layer3 founder Sergiy Usatyuk, the White House residential proxy activity might have gone unnoticed if not for the new tool.

“The observatory is just a public interface to explore the data we've been collecting for the past year,” Usatyuk told The Register in an email.

For those unfamiliar with residential proxies, they're like any old proxy network that obfuscates the location of a user, except in this case their exit nodes use IP addresses associated with residential internet connections, as opposed to datacenters. …