New Exploit Uses JavaScript To Compromise Intranets, VPNs

redsoxh8r writes "Security researcher Robert Hansen, known as Rsnake, has developed a new class of attack that abuses a weakness in many corporate intranets and most browsers to compromise remote machines with persistent JavaScript backdoors. Threatpost reports: 'The attacks rely on the long-term caching policies of some browsers and take advantage of the collisions that can occur when two different networks use the same non-routable IP address space, which happens fairly often because the amount of address space is quite small. The bottom line is that even a moderately skilled attacker has the ability to compromise remote machines without the use of any vulnerability or weakness in the client software.'"

Comments

Straight from the horse mouth

[Saija]

here

o..k

[QuantumG]

Yes, if you control the server end of a VPN connection you can tell the other end what to route you.. assuming the client has been configured that way. Why are VPN connections configured that way? Because the admin is considered the trusted party. The user (typically an employee) trusts the admin to be more secure than he is.

If the server was setup to route whatever the client said to route, that would be bad, but it's mostly not the case.