What is sniffing and their types explained
Q. What it sniffing?
Sniffing is the process of monitoring and capturing all the packets passing through a given network using sniffing tools, it is a form of "tapping phone wires" and get to know about the converstation. it is also called wiretapping applien to the computer networks.
Q. What can be get by sniffing?
One can be sniff the following sensitive information from a network.
1. E-mail traffic
2. FTP passwords
3. Web traffics
4. Talnet passwords
5. Router configuration
6. Chats sessions
How it works
A sniffer normally turns the NIC of the system to the promiscuous mode to that it listens to all the data transmitted on its segment.
Promiscuos mode refers to the unique way of Ethernet hardware, in particular, network interfacecards(NICs), that allows in NIC to receive all traffic on the network, even if it is not addressed to this NIC. By defualt, a NIC ignores all traffic that is not addressed to it, which is done by comparing the destination address of the ethernet packet with the hardware address (a.k.a. MAC) or the device. while this makes perfect sense for networking, non-promiscuos mode makes it difficult to use networks monitoring and analysis software for diagnisong connectivity issues or traffic accounting.
Types of sniffing
1. Passive sniffing
In passive sniffing, the traffic is locked but it is not attered in any way. passive sniffing allows listening only. it works with hub devices. on a hub device, the traffic is sent to all the ports in a network that user hubs to connect systems, all hosts on the network can see the traffic. Therefore, an attacker can easily capture traffic going through.
The good new is that hubs are almost obselete nowadays. Most modern networks use switches. Hence, passive sniffing is no more effective.
2. Active sniffing
In active sniffing, the traffic is not only locked and monitored, but it may also be attered in some way as determined by the attack. active sniffing is used to sniff a switch-based network. it involves injecting address resolution packets(ARP) into a target network to flood on the switch content addressable memory(CAM) table. CAM keeps track of which host is connected to which ports.
Active sniffing Technique
Following are the active sniffing tchniques
1. MAC flooding
2. DHCP attacks
3. DNS poisoning
4. spoofing attacks
5. ARP poisoning
Sniffing detect - nmap -sn -script=sniffer-detect IP
MAC flooding attack - Macof -i eth0 -d IP -n 100
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