Lemmy’s a lot better than Reddit for not being an echo chamber because the communities are less interest specific, and most of us are here because we’re the type to seek out a better discussion rather than stick with status quo.

But as it gets bigger and the communities become more niché it will become a bigger issue.

Not all VPN traffic. Only traffic that would be routable without a VPN.

This works by tricking the computer into routing traffic to the attacker’s gateway instead of the VPN’s gateway. It doesn’t give the attacker access to the VPN gateway.

So traffic intended for a private network that is only accessible via VPN (like if you were connecting to a corporate network for example) wouldn’t be compromised. You simply wouldn’t be able to connect through the attacker’s gateway to the private network, and there wouldn’t be traffic to intercept.

This attack doesn’t break TLS encryption either. Anything you access over https (which is the vast majority of the internet these days) would still be just as encrypted as if you weren’t using a VPN.

For most people, in most scenarios, this amount to a small invasion of privacy. Our hypothetical malicious coffee shop could tell the ip addresses of websites you’re visiting, but probably not what you’re doing on those websites, unless it was an insecure website to begin with. Which is the case with or with VPN.

For some people or some situations that is a MASSIVE concern. People who use VPNs to hide what they’re doing from state level actors come to mind.

But for the average person who’s just using a VPN because they’re privacy conscious, or because they’re location spoofing. This is not going to represent a significant risk.

So for this attack to work, the attacker needs to be able to run a malicious DHCP server on the target machine’s network.

Meaning they need to have already compromised your local network either physically in person or by compromising a device on that network. If you’ve gotten that far you can already do a lot of damage without this attack.

For the average person this is yet another non-issue. But if you regularly use a VPN over untrusted networks like a hotel or coffee shop wifi then, in theory, an attacker could get your traffic to route outside the VPN tunnel.