The situation is this,
I have a desktop machine at home and a work laptop which i connect to my home network via wireless. I then connect to my works network using a vpn.
When the VPN is connected on the work laptop all of the remote machines are visible on my desktop so it looks like hundreds of machines are connected to my home netowrk – should this be the case?
I thought the whole idea of VPN was that it was private. If this is the case then anytime I connect using a public access point my corporate network is visible to other people on the network.
Best Answer
At the end of the day, browsing the network in Network Neighborhood or My Network Places is facilitated via NetBIOS over TCP. My suspicion is that your home workgroup name matches your work domain name, or that you're browsing the network via the "Entire Network" selection in My Network Places and that you're specifically selecting the work network from the list of available networks. The fact that it shows up at all on the home desktop is because NetBIOS packets are travelling over the VPN connection and these packets (browse list announcements) are broadcast on the local network, so your desktop picks up these announcements and builds a browse list from them. That being said, no other computer on the local network has access to these work computers except via the VPN connection, so someone would have to hack the VPN connection on your laptop and "piggy back" a ride on the VPN connection in order to access your work network.