Windows Weakness Could Lead to Network Hijacks

[Rich Tate]

The way your Windows machine obtains its network settings could potentially allow an exploit to occur that could funnel your network traffic through an attackers hands.

"The upshot of it is that I can become your proxy server without you knowing about it," Chris Paget, director of research and development at IOActive, said in an interview after his presentation on the problem. "I can put up the equivalent of a detour sign on your network and redirect all the traffic."

 

[provoko]

.... how likely is that?... thats like saying someone who works at a bank who has access to your money can steal it.... WELL DUH! Haha.

 

[MorfiusX]

Welcome to TCP/IP... This is nothing new. Anyone who has worked in networking know what rouge DHCP and DNS servers can do. Also, this article is just plain wrong. Only proxy aware traffic will go through the proxy, such as IE traffic. All other traffic will not go through the proxy. Yey, how about that sensationalist reporting...

 

[nessus]

I use WPAD to configure clients attaching to our corporate network so that they go through our proxy server.

Of course, you can also set your proxy configuration corporation wide with IE on Windows using group policy if you don't use WPAD.

Strange that they called it a Windows weakness when Firefox on Linux configured to auto detect proxies works exactly the same way... Just like the RFC defines it should.