Of course, this is one way of capturing network traffic. The sniffing software is listening on the network interface card of the computer to collect all traffic which passes through the interface for analysis. The easiest way to collect network traffic with a sniffing tool is to connect your computer (which has the sniffer software installed) on a SPAN port of a switch which basically copies all traffic passing through the switch to that SPAN port. That’s why network traffic should be encrypted wherever possible.Īs a network and security engineer I have been using network sniffing tools for decades. Of course, hackers can also use network sniffing tools to collect personal data such as passwords over a network. Many network administrators use these tools to determine the efficiency of a network, to troubleshoot communication problems, to identify common network bottlenecks etc. A network sniffer, or packet sniffer, is a specialized software (or even a hardware device) that listens in over a network and records the IP packets of data that travel through it.
