Accessing you bank accounts or any confidential accounts like DEMAT, online banking in cyber café will be insecure as your PC may be attacked by sniffers.

Sniffers are a powerful piece of software. They have the capability to place the hosting system’s network card into promiscuous mode. A network card in promiscuous mode can receive all the data it can see, not just packets addressed to it. Sniffing performed on a hub is known as passive sniffing. Ethernet switches are smarter. A switch is supposed to be smart enough to know which particular port to send traffic to and block it from all the rest.When sniffing is performed on a switched network, it is known as active sniffing.

Sniffers can grab whatever they see on the wire and record it for later review. They allow the user to see all the data contained in the packet, even information that should remain hidden.

For sniffers to be successfully used, the attacker must be on your local network or on a prominent intermediary point, such as a border router, through which traffic passes. So in cyber café you don’t know who is accessing your local network.Traffic between two other hosts would not normally be seen by the attacker, as it would not normally be forwarded to the switch port that the sniffer is plugged in to. Media Access Control (MAC) flooding and Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) poisoning are the two ways that the attacker can attempt to overcome the limitations imposed by a switch.

Tags: ARP poisoning, hub or switch hacking, man in middle attack, sniffers