Monitoring someone’s online behaviour for unethical purpose.

Initiate phishing, SQL injection, or other cyberattacks.

Spying on businesses to steal confidential data.

Injecting malicious program or virus into a segment.

System admin - Check employees network usageĪdvertisers - Show relevant ads to targeted usersįrom the perspective of cybersecurity, sniffing refers to the process of routing or tapping the traffic to a target location, where it can be captured, analysed, and monitored.Ĭybercriminals practice packet sniffing for illegal activities such as – Network admins - Identify problems within the network and troubleshoot them Packet Sniffing is used by ethical hackers, network admins, advertisers, ISPs, government institutions, etc for various ethical practices as below. It means every packet that travels across the internet or a local network is gathered for a wide range of purposes such as – monitoring the traffic & bandwidth, maintain the networks, analyse the data collected by the device, and so on. Packet sniffing is the act of gathering, collecting, and monitoring the data pieces (packets) that travel through a computer network or the internet.

Security experts believe that you are not the ONLY person who has access to all the data – but someone else would also be sniffing on the data that travels across the internet. These packets travel across the internet to reach their destination, which could be another computer or server. Have you ever felt someone is spying on your browsing patterns?ĭid you know – when you surf online or browse your favourite website, you are sending data all across the globe?įrom sending emails to accessing a bank account, your information is broken down into piece – which is being sent in packets to data centres located a thousand miles away.

Network sniffing tools