Open proxy
A proxy that accepts connections from anyone with no authentication, which is what almost every address on a free proxy list actually is.
An open proxy answers whoever connects to it, with no username, no key and no allow-list. Some are deliberately public, but a great many are servers left misconfigured, which is why open proxies appear and vanish constantly and why no two lists of them agree for long.
Being open is also what makes them findable. Anyone can scan for a listening proxy, confirm it forwards traffic, and republish it, so the same address propagates across dozens of lists at once. That reach is the appeal for casual use and the risk for anything sensitive: an open proxy is shared with strangers by definition, and traffic sent through one unencrypted can be read by whoever runs it.
The honest way to describe a pool of them is by behaviour over time, not a headline count. An address that answered an hour ago may be gone now, so the useful question is not how many were ever listed but how many respond to a live check right now.
Our own record gives that question a hard answer. As of 11 August 2026 we had discovered and tested 589,918 open proxies. 4,023 were alive. 362,018 of them had never returned a single successful check in their entire recorded history, meaning they were dead before we ever saw them rather than having died since. The median lifespan of those that did work was about 145 hours, roughly six days.
Where they come from explains the numbers. A minority are deliberately public. The overwhelming majority are servers whose owner never intended to run a proxy at all: a misconfigured Squid installation, a forgotten test box, a container exposed to the internet by accident. Port 3128 turning up constantly on these lists is Squid's default, which tells you exactly what most of them are.
That origin is also the honest reason to be careful with them. Traffic through an open proxy passes in full view of whoever runs it, and whoever runs it usually does not know it is running. Anything unencrypted is readable, and the operator has neither an incentive nor an obligation to behave well, because they are not a provider and you are not a customer. For looking at a public page, fine. For anything carrying a credential, no.
How HProxy handles it
Our free list is built entirely from open proxies, and we keep a permanent record of every one we have ever seen, live or long dead. The majority never answered a single check across their whole history, which is exactly why we re-verify continuously rather than trusting a source's claim that an address works.
Frequently asked questions
Are open proxies safe to use?
For fetching a public page where nothing is at stake, they are usually harmless. For anything involving a login, a token or personal data, no. The operator sees all unencrypted traffic, most of them do not know they are running a proxy at all, and there is no relationship, accountability or incentive to behave well. Never send a credential through one.
Why do free proxies stop working so fast?
Because nobody is responsible for them. They are usually misconfigurations that get discovered, published, hammered by everyone who found the list, and then noticed and closed, or they simply fall over. Our measurement to 11 August 2026: 589,918 discovered, 4,023 alive, and a median lifespan of about 145 hours for those that ever worked at all.
Where do open proxies come from?
Mostly from mistakes rather than intent. Misconfigured caching servers, forgotten test machines, containers exposed to the internet by accident. Port 3128 appearing constantly on free lists is Squid's default port, which is a strong hint about the provenance of most entries. A small minority are deliberately public services.
Is it legal to use an open proxy?
It sits in genuinely grey territory, because most open proxies are unintentionally open, and using a service somebody did not mean to provide is not obviously the same as using a public one. Combined with the security exposure, that is a good reason to treat them as a curiosity and a research subject rather than as infrastructure.
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