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. While many are legitimate, others are exploited by threat actors and used in the commission of cybercrimes, as the FBI warned earlier this year. The FBI bulletin, put out in March, warns users to protect their systems against hijacking via malware, illicit SDK partnerships, VPNs with hidden service terms that repurpose user computers as exit nodes, and other threats used to turn victims into nodes without their consent. Residential proxies are commonly used by threat actors to conceal command-and-control (C2) infrastructure, conduct phishing attacks, send spam, disguise malicious traffic, and the like, the FBI explained. According to Layer3, its data shows 28 distinct residential proxy services exiting into the White House network nearly every day between October 5 and November 3, with 236 separate exits in that period. Other residential proxy detection services logged the same information, Layer3 said. Most of the activity was happening in the evening, White House time, between 5 pm and midnight…