Ethical Hacking - Sniffing Tools

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There are so many tools available to perform sniffing over a network, and they all have their own features to help a hacker analyze traffic and dissect the information. Sniffing tools are extremely common applications. We have listed here some of the interesting ones −

• BetterCAP − BetterCAP is a powerful, flexible and portable tool created to perform various types of MITM attacks against a network, manipulate HTTP, HTTPS and TCP traffic in real-time, sniff for credentials, and much more.
• Ettercap − Ettercap is a comprehensive suite for man-in-the-middle attacks. It features sniffing of live connections, content filtering on the fly and many other interesting tricks. It supports active and passive dissection of many protocols and includes many features for network and host analysis.
• Wireshark − It is one of the most widely known and used packet sniffers. It offers a tremendous number of features designed to assist in the dissection and analysis of traffic.
• Tcpdump − It is a well-known command-line packet analyzer. It provides the ability to intercept and observe TCP/IP and other packets during transmission over the network. Available at www.tcpdump.org.
• WinDump − A Windows port of the popular Linux packet sniffer tcpdump, which is a command-line tool that is perfect for displaying header information.
• OmniPeek − Manufactured by WildPackets, OmniPeek is a commercial product that is the evolution of the product EtherPeek.
• Dsniff − A suite of tools designed to perform sniffing with different protocols with the intent of intercepting and revealing passwords. Dsniff is designed for Unix and Linux platforms and does not have a full equivalent on the Windows platform.
• EtherApe − It is a Linux/Unix tool designed to display graphically a system's incoming and outgoing connections.
• MSN Sniffer − It is a sniffing utility specifically designed for sniffing traffic generated by the MSN Messenger application.
• NetWitness NextGen − It includes a hardware-based sniffer, along with other features, designed to monitor and analyze all traffic on a network. This tool is used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

A potential hacker can use any of these sniffing tools to analyze traffic on a network and dissect information.