What cybersecurity research teams do
OSINT and threat-intelligence work is largely about observing the open web the way a targeted user would — from the right country, with the right kind of IP, and without a corporate egress address giving the analyst away. Residential proxies let a team look at public infrastructure and content from many independent vantage points at once.
- Observe how phishing kits, scam sites, and malicious redirects behave for visitors in different countries.
- Collect public indicators — domains, URLs, and hosting details — from open sources, feeds, and sandboxes.
- Check whether attacker infrastructure cloaks or geofences, serving a decoy page to some regions and a payload to others.
- Monitor public paste sites, forums, and marketplaces for brand, domain, or credential mentions, within their terms.
- Confirm takedown progress by verifying a flagged page is gone from several geographic vantage points.
Why residential IPs and geo targeting help
Malicious infrastructure is often built to hide from researchers. It is common for a phishing or malware host to fingerprint the visitor and serve a harmless placeholder to datacenter ranges, known scanners, or IPs outside the campaign's target region — while showing the real page only to residential visitors in the country being attacked. A residential IP in that region returns the same view the intended victim would see.
Geographic diversity also reduces blind spots. Content, redirects, and DNS answers can differ from one country to the next, so a single office location paints an incomplete picture. Country-level targeting across 227 countries and territories lets you emulate a local visitor almost anywhere, and rotating across many IPs distributes a large collection job so no single address dominates the traffic to a target.
Which Nefo features fit the workflow
You can match the session type and protocol to each task rather than forcing everything through one connection style.
- Rotating sessions assign a fresh IP per request — ideal for broad, stateless sweeps across long lists of indicators.
- Sticky sessions hold one IP for up to ~24 hours when you need to walk through a multi-step flow or a session-bound page consistently.
- Country targeting works everywhere via a simple country token, so you can pivot to the region a campaign is aimed at.
- City and state targeting is available in most countries, more than 22,000 cities in all, when you need metro-level precision.
- HTTPS and SOCKS5 are on every plan, so browsers, headless tooling, and custom analysis scripts all connect the same way.
Stay lawful and in scope
Cybersecurity research on Nefo is for collecting publicly available information only. That means respecting each site's terms of service and robots directives, keeping request rates reasonable, avoiding personal data you are not permitted to process, and complying with applicable law. A proxy changes where your request appears to come from — it does not grant any right of access.
It is never a tool for probing, authenticating to, or interacting with systems you are not authorized to test, and it should not be used to distribute malware, harvest credentials, or evade security controls. If your work involves active testing, keep it within a scope you are explicitly authorized to assess. Our Acceptable Use Policy sets out what is and is not allowed.
How to start from 5 GB
Bandwidth is pay-as-you-go from 5 GB ($4.50, or $0.90/GB) and does not expire, so you can scope a small pilot — pull a handful of indicators from a few countries — before committing to a larger sweep. Buy any amount of GB and top up as your investigations grow.
You can pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Alipay, Binance Pay or crypto. Every plan includes a dashboard with usage analytics, API access for automating collection, and fast human support when a target behaves unexpectedly.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. It is for lawful collection of publicly available information, such as open-source intelligence and public threat indicators. It is not for unauthorized access, active exploitation or anything outside a scope you are permitted to assess. See the acceptable use policy.
Use rotating sessions for high-volume sweeps where each indicator is checked independently. Use sticky sessions, held up to 24 hours, to observe a multi-step flow or a page that ties behavior to one session.
Country targeting covers 227 countries and territories. City and state targeting is available in most countries, across 22,417 cities, for metro-level precision.
HTTPS and SOCKS5 are both available. HTTPS suits browsers and most HTTP clients; SOCKS5 suits custom scripts and tools that need a lower-level connection.
Per gigabyte, from 5 GB for $4.50 ($0.90/GB), and it never expires. Larger plans cost less per GB, down to $0.53/GB at 10 TB, so a small pilot costs little.