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In June 2015, independent researchers said Hola had not fixed the vulnerabilities they reported; Hola said it had fixed two of them within hours. That dispute is documented, but the available record does not establish that every reported flaw remains exploitable in 2026.
What did researchers say was still unfixed?
The claim comes from a public disagreement in June 2015 between the Adios Hola researchers and Hola, the company behind the VPN service. SecurityWeek reported the researchers’ allegation that the vulnerabilities remained, even though Hola’s updates had disrupted their checker and exploit demonstration. Their words were: “The vulnerabilities are still there, they just broke our vulnerability checker and exploit demonstration.”
Hola CEO Ofer Vilenski said two vulnerabilities had been fixed “within hours of them being published.” He also said, “The hackers who identified these issues did their job,” and “we did our job by fixing them.” The researchers said they had found six vulnerabilities and disputed whether the updates eliminated all attack paths.
So “still unfixed” accurately describes what researchers alleged at the time; it is not a verified statement about every current Hola version. The sources summarized here do not establish whether the reported issues can be exploited in 2026 or whether they have since been patched.
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Which Hola apps and risks were involved?
The 2015 advisory covered several parts of the service rather than one isolated client:
- Hola’s Windows client and engine
- The Firefox add-on and Chrome extension
- The Android application
Researchers reported multiple categories of risk, including remote code execution, privilege escalation, local file access through path traversal, persistent tracking, and privacy exposure related to Hola’s peer-to-peer architecture. These were reported vulnerability classes—not proof that every Hola user was successfully attacked.
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Why did Hola’s peer-to-peer design raise concerns?
Hola participants could act as exit nodes: traffic from another user could pass through a participant’s internet connection. That creates a different concern from a flaw in a particular app version. It can expose a participant to abuse attribution if third-party activity appears to come from their connection, as well as privacy and man-in-the-middle risks described by researchers and contemporaneous reporting.
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CSO Online quoted the researchers’ conclusion that “The architecture of Hola is most likely unfixable. The only reliable solution to the problem is to completely uninstall Hola, whether it is ‘fixed’ or not.” This was the researchers’ assessment of the design, not a finding that every user’s traffic was intercepted or that every current Hola version has a specific exploitable bug.
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Ars Technica reported Hola’s contemporaneous claim of more than 47 million users in 2015. That figure was a company claim reported at the time, not an independently verified measurement.
What did Hola say it would do?
Alongside its claim that two vulnerabilities had been fixed, Hola said it would conduct internal and external security reviews, hire a chief security officer, and launch a bug-bounty program. The researchers maintained that updates had broken their demonstration without closing all attack paths. The Register reported that they considered some weaknesses potentially unpatchable and raised man-in-the-middle concerns even after the updates.
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The reporting therefore records competing claims about both the fixes and the design. It does not resolve which attack paths, if any, remain in current releases.
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Yes. Vulnerability Laboratory published a 2016 disclosure concerning Hola VPN Windows client version 1.34. It described local privilege escalation caused by insecure permission configuration. That is evidence of a later vulnerability report; by itself, it does not show that current Windows clients—or other Hola apps—are vulnerable.
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What should Hola users conclude now?
The historical record supports treating the 2015 concerns seriously, especially the distinction between fixable client bugs and risks associated with routing other users’ traffic through participants’ connections. It does not support a blanket claim that all Hola users are currently exploitable.
If you still have an old Hola installation, uninstalling it removes that installation from your device; it does not establish whether a current version is safe or resolve the wider question of the service’s architecture. For any VPN you consider using, check whether routing is server-based or peer-to-peer, whether subscribers’ IP addresses can carry third-party traffic, what encryption and protocols are documented, whether leak protection and a kill switch are offered, and whether independent audits and patch history are publicly available.
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