Cyber crime : Sniffing

There are a lot of cyber crime involving the Internet and one of them is Packet Sniffing. Naturally, packet sniffing is not a cyber crime because it is used to monitor the network and data transfer between networks. These are done by networking company such as CISCO. But in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. By using packet sniffing software, you can get other people information through the net.

How does this works??

Information travels in the web by packets. The informations are usually big in data size and would consume a lot of bandwidth to transfer. So the big data is broken down to smaller bytes of data called Packets. For examples, let say you are watching a video on YouTube or viewing a picture of a friend in Facebook, you notice that the video will takes time to fully load until you can watch it fully right? Same goes to viewing pictures. They will take some time to load depending on the speed of your Internet connection. This happens because of what I mentioned earlier, where the data is broken down into smaller packets and transfered via the Net packets by packets. I hope you could understand this because I tried to explain as simple as possible.

Back to the topic, so where does the sniffing play its part? As you can see in the picture above, the sniffers will intercept your information while it is in transfer. This way, they can view all the information you put on the Net. They do not interrupt with the transfer process, the information will be send to the destination, its just intercepted and viewed by sniffers en route. This picture illustrated the data viewed by the sniffers in their computer. Looks complicated, isn't it? Yes it is complicated but with knowledge in networking, this is child's play. Its like reading directly into your diary without your information and you will never know.

So, how can you avoid your data being sniff by these sniffers? You can never be to sure because the Internet was never designed to be secure, but some measures in your end must be taken. These are a few things that you can do :

• Do not reveal sensitive information. Lots of people do their banking and using credit card online. Be careful to whom you reveal your information to because you will never know.
• Be careful when using open wireless connection. Nowadays, you can find free open wireless connection almost everywhere. So be very careful when using these open network because you might be giving your information for free. Do not login into your bank account or any other website that will require you to put in your username and password for you to use it. Only use open connection for browsing website that do not require you to put in your information like reading the news.
• Be careful who you are with. You will never know if there are sniffers among your friends so take caution. They might be after your information. 
• Frequently update your antivirus and other protection software. Frequent update of your protection software might put you at ease but still, be very careful.
• Make sure your computer are configured correctly. Make sure to check the security settings in your computer. If you do not know how, refer to your nearest IT technician or relatives that knows about network security. 

So, be careful while surfing the Net because the Net originally was not design to be secure. So take caution to be safe.

HAPPY SURFING!

AND DO BE CAREFUL