Yeah... authentication is pretty easily sniffed off the network if you're doing FTP (using programs like Cain and Able for Windows pretty much takes the work out of sniffing for you).

But if you're on a direct connection to your cable modem, which is in turn connecting to a remote machine which is directly connected, the odds of someone "in-between" sniffing your info is pretty low...


Tracing my route from here to Google looks like this:
Tracing route to google.com [216.239.39.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms xxxxx
2 24 ms 31 ms 9 ms xxxxx
3 11 ms 14 ms 11 ms xxxxx
4 29 ms 30 ms 32 ms xxxxx
5 47 ms 43 ms 70 ms gar1-p360.sc1ca.ip.att.net [12.122.2.242]
6 54 ms 48 ms 46 ms tbr1-p012102.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.2.246]
7 56 ms 43 ms 50 ms ggr2-p300.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.190]
8 45 ms 45 ms 44 ms so-8-1.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [209.0.227.29]
9 47 ms 53 ms 47 ms ae-1-51.bbr1.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.1]
10 113 ms 103 ms 108 ms ae-0-0.bbr1.Washington1.Level3.net [64.159.0.229]
11 108 ms 101 ms 105 ms ge-1-1-51.car1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.121.5]
12 103 ms 102 ms 107 ms 4.79.228.26
13 104 ms 103 ms 103 ms 64.233.174.126
14 107 ms 108 ms 106 ms 216.239.48.90
15 109 ms 104 ms 106 ms 216.239.47.58
16 108 ms 109 ms 102 ms 216.239.39.99
Trace complete.
As you can see, most all of those are ISP hubs... and they're not too concerned with my FTP info. FTP is just kind of the defacto standard for file transfer...