A Quick Intro to Sniffers

A Sniffer (also know as a Network Analyzer) is a piece of software that can look at network traffic, decode it, and give meaningful data that a network administrator can use to diagnose problems on a network. Sniffers are also useful tools for deviant computer users since they can be used to pull plain text passwords off a network. A few popular general purpose Sniffers are NAI Sniffer (commercial), Wireshark (previously know as Ethereal, an Open Source GUI Sniffer for Linux, Windows and other platforms), TCPDump (Open Source command line Sniffer for *nix – any Unix like operating system like Linux or FreeBSD-) and its Windows version called WinDump.

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