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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.'"
Isn't this the definition of a vulnerability or weakness in the client software? Just because you don't see xxxx as a threat in advance doesn't mean someone won't eventually use it as one.
Turning coffee into code.
Yes, IPv6 would help here, and in a lot of other instances. With IPv6, unless you're already communicating with a host, or it has a public identity because it's a server, the chances of you guessing its IP address are vanishingly small. So this attack wouldn't work, and also the typical attack that internet worms do where they just randomly try ports on various IP addresses en masse also wouldn't work, because the statistics are no longer in their favor.
All it is is a pretty wild theory that an exploit could occur... and there are a vast number of increasingly unlikely events that have to transpire for it to happen.
a) Your browser has to have unpatched remote script injection exploits.
b) You have to be using VPN to connect to *an untrusted network*. This is the opposite of what you normally use VPN for
c) Once connected to this insecure network via VPN, you have to for some reason visit a page on it that shares the IP address as another web server in your network. As well, the person who is hosting the exploit script on this page (that they are trying to cache) has to also know the name of the exact same script file *on your network*, so that the cache will pick it up the next time you connect to your own resources.
To me, all seems very unlikely. Sure, you could do this in a lab environment, but in the real world, if a would-be-intruder already knew that much about your network, and you are for some reason VPN'ing into a network that they control, then you likely have bigger issues with physical security and meat-space trust relationships in our business, and are already screwed over.
Nope, you won't. It was stated in his article that HTTPS is immune.
You could also dump all cached content when the browser closes. (That's what I do)
The only thing that can get me is cookies!... but they're so useful and tasty...