Open Proxy Listings

Despite the reputation of open proxies, there are ways to use them in a more reliable and secure manner. Here are several methods.

Frequent updates: New open proxies can come online at any time. You need the latest lists of open proxy IPs & ports. To get them, you need to regularly download or scrape public lists of open proxies. But not all published lists tell when they were last updated. It’s smart to test everything you get.

Frequent testing: Open proxies can die at any time. When they do, your requests will start failing. So don’t just check that they are up, but also confirm that:

1. your requests succeed in a reasonable amount of time

2. your requests have not been modified in transit

3. no malicious code has been inserted in the response you can do this by having a piece of content you control on a remote server, then checking that requests through each proxy return that content unmodified, without timing out or taking too long.