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by mi_lk 915 days ago
for uninitiated (me), why is it bad?
4 comments

Well in my case (and a lot of other people), 192.168.1.1 is the local address of my home router. So if I go to microsoft.com I have a 1 in 7 chance of getting my home router instead (if I ignore the certificate warning). Other random breakage will happen depending on what that local address is assigned to for you.

In theory this could be leveraged for hacking, but I think that would require setup in advance.

yep. If a hacker can somehow control 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 they get access to your microsoft.com cookies at least. I'm sure there are more microsoft specific ways to leverage this too (e.g. data/updates hosted on microsoft.com that misuse HTTPS as a poor man's authentication. The curl | sh crowd are especially susceptible to this problem.)
They would still need the private key to a https cert that your browser considers valid.
Since 2 out of the 7 IPs are 192.168 (private ips), 2/7 visitors to microsoft.com will load the private ones assumign equal weight and not get the page to load.
It's an IP address reserved for private networks:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1918

So if you go to microsoft.com with probability 1/7 you'll hit 1.1 on your private network of 192.168 - likely router, and with probability 1/7 you'll hit 1.0 maybe printer