Yup, your second paragraph nails it. But even then, it boarders on XSS or some hybrid injection attack which would rely on a vulnerability somewhere else up th

Yup, your second paragraph nails it. But even then, it boarders on XSS or some hybrid injection attack which would rely on a vulnerability somewhere else up the stack. The way I understood a lot of this article, I'm lead to believe that their able to monitor/intercept a target's requests, imitate the web server and send replies which are so meticulously malformed that they are able to infect the target system. Like I said in my post and which you echo in your third paragraph, it's one thing to trick users into downloading and running binaries or to exploit a plugin, but it's another thing to imagine malformed packets breaking the security of an entire system.