End of the SOCKS Bubble?

Let me say right up front that I haven't run the numbers in depth yet, but it looks like the SOCKS boom is BUSTED in proxyland.

At this point in time, glancing over The List you'll see a few on the traditional SOCKS port (1080) and those mysterious port 27977 proxies. Just last month there were pages and pages and pages of port-hopping SOCKS4 proxies.

Where are they now? Did someone take down a botnet?

I haven't heard anything on that particular front since Microsoft & Rustock back in March, but SONY, RSA, PBS, et. al. have been hogging all the security news with their issues with LulzSec. You'd think after all that crap anyone who downed a botnet would be beating their drum pretty loud by now.

The daily numbers are pretty much the same. Every day I get 2500-5000 new proxies scraping the usual suspects. As usual, over half of them are Chinese, on port 9415.

I'm not all that sorry to see them go. Despite their usefulness for non-Web traffic, I have always preferred the plain old http (CERN) proxies, although lately I've been using a Glype proxy here and there (with NoScprit & Ad Block to kill the ads they try to shove down your throat) just because they're easy to use and generally dependable.

Maybe they'll return, but I have a feeling they're gone for now.