WPAD

Yesterday the US-CERT released a Technical Alert (TA16-144A) about the recently found WPAD Name Collision Vulnerability. We will give you a summary about the vulnerability as well as the basic mechanisms here.

The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol is used to auto-configure the proxy for web browsers. So when joining the according network the browser can use DHCP and DNS methods to find a specific configuration file (typically named wpad.dat), which is loaded and applied to the browser’s settings. Therefore, there is no need to configure each browser in your environment individually/manually.