Sniffing the Corporate and Institutional Network


by Embedded
12 December 1998

red

Corporate and Institutional Survival Techniques

Sniffing the Corporate and Institutional Network



(You unix gurus, no laughing! ;)

This essay will talk about using a little piece of software called Sniffer Pro 1.0 by Network Associates (used to be called Net X-Ray before it was bought out). We will discuss how to extract data at the lowest level as far as the internet/intranet is concerned.

I hope you've all been reading Fravia+ pages and learned that the internet is such a large collection of information. However, how many of us have thought about the basics of the internet. It is like learning to program in assembler. We should understand how the fundamentals work. We have these little packets that contain data flying everywhere. It would make sense that if we could look at these little gold nuggets, we could extract the information we wanted right out of them. Security, not much left after this... then again I think that's what that whole SSL thing is all about (if someone would like to talk about Secure Sockets... please send me a copy). Imagine a phone line with a tap in it. Heck imagine a whole building of phone lines and your at the switchboard... and then you realize the possibilities.

Your network card sees all the traffic on the hub its connected too. If several hubs are daisy chained together, heck all the better. I hope we all know that telnet and ftp are both inherently unsecure. Meaning all data transferred is in plain text. That is, when y