Use of private IPs could leave enterprises vulnerable

Network administrators are using "private" nonroutable IP addresses as specified in the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) RFC 1918 standard, with the mistaken belief that these IP addresses afford them with an additional layer of security.

Using a series of scenarios, well-known security researcher Robert Hansen dispelled this myth by illustrating a number of security weaknesses that can actually arise from using private IP addresses. The root cause of such problems appears to be when technologies rely on the nonroutable properties of private IP addresses as a means to secure themselves--the limited range of such addresses makes it trivial to figure out the internal IP addresses.

The creator of the Metasploit penetration testing tool, HD Moore, sums up the issues with RFC 1918. "The mobile aspect of laptops and smartphones undermines any privacy or security feature based on control of an IP address or DNS name. Cache poisoning is just one method of exploiting this--many other attacks become possible when the attacker can impersonate a trusted host."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at DarkReading

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