LAN security with many people using the network

Hi. I live in an apartement building a bunch of my family lives in the same building. We all share a LAN connection and my brother is the one that has the router. I am a little concerned about my privacy because I don't know whether or not the other people that use this network can see which websites I am going to, who I chat with etc. Is there a way that they can do this (I am very uneducated with technology) see who I am chatting with and see which websites I have visited? Also I use Skype and MSN a lot to voice with my friends and while I don't think anyone else can hear my conversations (not that they are inappropriate or anything I am just a privacy freak!) I am getting paranoid that they can somehow tap into all of this. Can anyone tell me if they can (cause I think I have heard about programs that can do this) and also if there is any way that I can detect if they are doing this? Thanks so much!

if your brother controls the router and it has a firewall that most do then it probably contains syslogging capability. he can set a filter to show all the requests and responses you get. he can also set up a sniffer to read all plain text you get/send.

So the real question we need to ask back is:

Is it a Wired or Wireless LAN?


If it is Wired then your question comes down to how twchno savvy your brother is.. for that matter the rest of the family..

If it is Wireless... Well that is a completly different can of worms...

No it is not a wireless connection it's a wired LAN connection. My brother isn't very techno savvy but I would have to say that my cousin is and so that is who I am more worried about.
How easy it is to set up a sniffer and how easy is it to do the filter thing? Also is there anything I can do (other than getting a connection that I don't share) to stop them from doing this? And the audio and video conversations can't be recorded can they? Thanks for your help!

I'm presuming that it is just the arverage run if the mill home router? If so then in all likelyhood there will not be a function from within the actual router to log the traffic passing though it - the will be a firewall log but this will probably not be advanced enough to log data from established connections initiated from the inside.

If I was going to sniff your traffic, I would put a hub between you and the router and attach a laptop to this running Ethereal or any other packet sniffing application to view all traffic coming and going to/fro your computer.

Follow your LAN cable all the way to the router and make sure it does plug directly into the router and nothing else.

There is no realistic way to remotley detect if he is doing this on your home network other than a physical inspection of the cable.

//Unencrypted voice (VoIP) conversations can be easily recorded and played back with this method.