Holy Mother of God..... did you know this

[kombinant]

I was playing w/ different sniffers on my Linux box. I am on Roadrunner Cable in NYC. so here it goes...

I AM ON THE SAME SUBNET W/ ABOUT 10 OTHER PPL.

I CAN SEE ALL THEIR TRAFFIC.

I don't know if this is something "everyone" knows or what??? Is this legal???

... if see them... they see me...right???

what can I do to protect my privacy???

[(V)/\><]

yes of course they can see your traffic. thats how lans are designed, so it is legal. you are on a shared network segment, probably with switches seperating the segments, making it a shared, switched network.

another downside is that you are all sharing / competing for the same bandwidth.

to protect your privacy you must move to another cable company. preferably some sort of dedicated switched network.

[lord_darkside_x]

yeah and if they are start running p2p's like kazaa or running webservers, expect a huge drop off on bandwidth. shared switch networks are quite a pain when heavy traffic starts flowing

[cire]

I thought that packets that were not meant for your machine could not be sniffed on a switched network. It was my impression that that is the advnatage of a switch over a hub. Please correct me.

[kombinant]

yes you are correct, the switch will forward the packets to their destinatino NIC by examining theri MAC address....

now, come to think of it... it's really quite obvious... that my neighborhood would "share" the network... It's just I never though about it. I wonder if it's the same for DSL. ANyone?? It was kind of a shock to me so sorry for the crazy post Title, but this seems to be a HUGE HOLE... This are the ppl I live next to... It's kinda creepy... I don't know; what if there's another Mitnick living on my street???

[HTRegz]

Originally posted here by kombinant
I don't know; what if there's another Mitnick living on my street???

Then you'll find him digging through your trash, or talking to you to try some social-engineering. I highly doubt you'd find him inside your computer, he wouldn't know what to do.

[sarang]

hey can we see the traffic flow through windows

[lord_darkside_x]

on a lan you can pick up all the traffic on that lan. using xp it is realtively simple but not exactly legal i don't think. i don't know much about other windows based os's cause i only have used xp on the current lan, but i'll let you know when i try out a few other boxes

[kombinant]

I called Time Warner Tech Support and after about 25 minutes talking to the "grunts" I got a "data engineer" on the phone. He told me this was "know vounerability". He sounded as if he's reading a transcript... It's probably in the user agreement as well...

I have a question... in order to practice, do you think It would be ethical for me to sniff my neighbors' traffic. I'd really like to look into packet disassembly and forensics (if that's the right name) I don't have access to wild random traffic like this anywhere else...

so what do you think

[(V)/\><]

do you think It would be ethical for me to sniff my neighbors' traffic

regardless, haven't you already done it anyway?

I was playing w/ different sniffers on my Linux box...
...I CAN SEE ALL THEIR TRAFFIC.

you should sniff traffic that you know what it is. or, to practice, you should know what you are sniffing atleast, hence, random traffic would not be good. first, i would read books on tcp and books on ip. and then go back to ``practicing sniffing''.

also, if you are practicing, 10 seconds sniffing with 10 people using moderate bandwidth would give you enough packets to disassembly for the next few months...and would mainly prove to be a pointless exercise due to the amount of time you would waste looking at something that you don't know what you are looking at. ``looking into packet disassembly'' this way is completely arse-ways. you have to know how to construct packets before you can even pretend to yourself that you want to go disassembling them.