What happened to NetNut?
On July 2, 2026, the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation seized the NetNut proxy platform, and Google’s Threat Intelligence Group announced it had disrupted the linked “Popa” botnet, a network of roughly two million compromised smart TVs and streaming boxes. Google has also stated that many popular proxy brands quietly resell or white-label that same supply.
If your provider’s IPs came from that pool (or from a reseller riding on top of it), your data operation now carries legal and reputational risk you didn’t sign up for. To avoid these risks, you need a network whose sourcing you can verify.
Source: U.S. FBI/IRS-CI; Google Threat Intelligence Group; KrebsOnSecurity, July 2026.
