Where do "Free Proxies" come from?

Over in my favorite white-hat tech forum, I read about all these bad people that infect other people's computers and get them to do things. Bad things like spam and DoS attacks, etc...

Occured to me a while back that maybe these compromised machines might be unknowingly being used to proxy web-traffic.

Is this the case? I get a lot of customers asking me why malware authors create their evil works, and it's hard for me to answer for certain. Is this one reason why?

If so, why would they make these proxies available to everyone? Only thing I can think of is that it allows them anonymity and makes it harder to track their activities.

Maybe they're old-school. Originally, the internet was all about sharing. All smtp mail servers were wide open for anybody to use.

if you want to see where free proxies come from open up a proxy instance in apache unprotected and wait one week. Your connection will probably be completely saturated in a matter of days.

I am sure people have their reasons for purposely leaving them open but its not always on purpose. many companies are unaware that they have open proxies and people hammering them.

Lmao Im learning about proxies