Thursday, March 23, 2006

IP-Packet sniffer screensaver

I found this screensaver that is a network packet sniffer - it puts the packet header and a few dozen bytes from the packet on screen as a fountain-style screensaver - very nice and consuming to watch.
It did puzzle me a bit as we are on a switched network here at Root6 and yet it seems to see things that are on separate segments - I hope it isn't doing some sort of ARP-poisoning or man-in-the-middle type attacks to get the data!

I often notice packets from our Cisco 'phone system whizz past as well as web and email headers. This, along with Steve Gibson's Security Now podcasts really have filled in a few holes in my appreciation of how IP moves over both ethernet and internets.

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