Network Sniffing: A Critical Concept in Network Security

What Is Network Sniffing? Sniffing includes the passive interception of data packets crossing a network with further analysis. Initially, sniffing was developed to help network administrators troubleshoot connectivity problems, and since then, it has evolved into an important technique of network management and security testing. How Does Network Sniffing Work? Basically, network sniffing is based on the fact that a network interface card is set in "promiscuous mode:" all network traffic crossing its path is captured, not just packets addressed to the device. Then sniffing software analyzes the packets captured, allowing a user to read and interpret the data crossing the network.