ABSTRACT
A sniffing attack is among the various types of attacks on Local Area Networks (LANs). It is an easy attack to perform and may be very harmful. Network traffic sniffing allows malicious users to easily steal confidential data, passwords, and anyone’s privacy. Because many basic services, such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Telnet, and e-mail (SMTP/POP3), send passwords and data in cleartext, malicious users can easily spy on the network’s users by analyzing the contents of the corresponding captured network traffic. For other services, a decryption program may be needed to pull passwords out of data streams. All unprotected network traffic can be vulnerable to sniffing.
