Ok now don’t panic. That’s not entirely true; it’s not an open book for everyone, but for people who know how to read it, it is and that itself sounds bad enough !!!!
Of late the popularity of instant messaging has grown tremendously and has become part and parcel of everyday life at least in the field of IT, but have you ever stopped to think, that someone might be reading all your conversations?
Before getting all excited about it let us get the facts of Ethernet (
IEEE 802.3) straight. Computers communicating in an Ethernet LAN could be attributed to group of people talking to each other in a room. When Mike says “Tony, what’s the time now?”, even though all the others in the room can hear, they will choose to ignore because the question is not “addressed” to them. However Tony will respond to the question. Now, if anyone else were really interested they could intrude into Mike’s and Tony’s conversation by just listening to them. In such a set up, will you still communicate any sensitive information? I Don’t Think So. The best alternative would be to develop a code language so that even if others heard what you are talking, they will not be able to understand anything, and that’s equivalent to
encrypting your data in computing jargon.
Unfortunately, most of the communication protocols especially
Instant Messaging(IM) protocols don’t encrypt their data before sending and thus giving unauthorized access to your communication.
Now I’m sure you must be under the impression that listening to a network is indeed rocket science!!!
Not at all, it is actually easier than you think as long as you know what tools to use. There is one such powerful tool available out there called
Ethereal. These network monitoring tools are like fire, you can use it for the betterment of humanity and also for destructive purposes.
If you were wondering what I was doing with Ethereal, I downloaded it to experiment with GTP’ (GPRS Tunneling Protocol). My primary aim was to look into the possibility of using Ethereal to capture GTP packets and saving it as binary files but to my disappointment I could only view the content of the packet but not save it as a binary file. However, after playing around with Ethereal, all the IMs are strictly for official messages only:-)
posted by 88Pro / Monday, March 29, 2004
