Jaguar

Jaguar is a malicious residential proxy botnet and proxy service assessed to be operated by a Chinese company. It is part of a broader ecosystem of large-scale proxy botnets built from compromised consumer devices, particularly Android devices carrying preinstalled backdoors. Jaguar has been observed at roughly 2 million IPs per day, including approximately 600,000 devices directly attributed to Jaguar and additional capacity sourced through a second botnet, reflecting the common practice among proxy operators of combining self-operated infections with access resold from other botnets. The operation has shown a strong geographic asymmetry, with almost no victims observed in mainland China, consistent with patterns seen across multiple Chinese-operated proxy services that exclude domestic devices from their proxy pools. Jaguar’s core capability is providing illicit proxy infrastructure through compromised endpoints, enabling anonymized downstream abuse by customers or affiliated operators. High-confidence reporting supports its use of preinstalled Android backdoors as the primary infection vector and its role within a resilient criminal proxy supply chain rather than as a ransomware or destructive actor.