Re: [Sheflug] igmp packets...... it's getting worse....

[Jim Jackson <nospam [at] comp.leeds.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2000, ross wrote:

> On Wednesday 15 November 2000 23:16, you wrote:
> > Ethereal is a nice tool though, so give that a whirl
> > Chris...
> 
> i'm gobsmacked..................
> 
> i didn't realise it was so easy to look at the contents of packets as they 
> moved around the network........

how easy do you think it is to listen to your phone calls? Given that an
awefull lot of trunk traffic is now at several hundreds of megabits/sec is not
gigabits, filtering and logging all that traffic is not a trivial task - even
tracing destination/source pairs and ignoring the data can be difficult.

If you are paranoid about local snooping on your local network, and you should
be - that's far more likely than snooping on ISP and telecos links/networks,
then you run secure systems that need root/administrator rights to set
ethercards in promiscuous mode and physically secure the network connection
points/wires/routers/switches or you run a fully switched network - no hubs no
repeaters. That way the vast majority of the packets are not sniffable on
other ports - only the odd unicast packet and all multi/broadcast stuff.

> i geuss this is how hackers get your emails and passwords then.....
> does this mean it's possible to listen in to general network trafic outside 
> of my machine?
> don't worry.... it's not a general pastime of mine to eavs drop on 
> others...... just want to know how much of what i do and say is available to 
> others......
> 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.