"Sniffing the Wire:" A Presentation

Submitted by Edward Marczak on Tue, 10/16/2007 - 17:02

Posting the movie from a recent talk about watching what's flowing on your network.

(Updated with handout materials 2005-12-19)

In conjunction with Tan from Reality Artisans, I recently gave a talk called, "Sniffing the Wire: Methods and Prevention" to a group of consultants from the Tri-State chapter of the Apple Consultants Network.  The talk covered how we can sniff network data, why such an ability is useful for both good (troubleshooting/reverse engineering) and bad (crackers grabbing passwords) and and what we can do to mitigate the issues.

Many people will post their presentation slides for download after they've given a talk.  However, the slides are usually not that useful without the talk.  With the help of Paul Weisz to record the audio, I edited the entire presentation into a Quicktime movie.  It's available here:

ACN_Sniffing_Preso-200511.mov

You'll need QuickTime 7 to view and listen, as H.264 compression gave me the best bang for the buck - it's almost 2 hours long, runs at 640x480 and has a mono audio track compressed with AAC.  All for 180MB of download.  Also, here is a PDF of the handout:

ACN_Sniffing_Preso-Handout.pdf

Even though this was targeted at a group that uses OS X as their main axe, the ideas and tools apply to all network systems and platforms.  Also, as mentioned during the talk, this certainly isn't an exhaustive list of every possible vector of attack or every solution, but it certainly should get everyone up to speed on the issue and the absolute basic things that should be done to help everyone that roams and uses foreign hot spots.

If anyone has any questions, needs more detail, or would like me to talk to you or your organization about network (in)security, please don't hesitate to contact me.

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Submitted by Edward Marczak on Wed, 10/17/2007 - 11:28.

Here's a good complimentary article from InfoWorld:

http://ww6.infoworld.com/products/print_friendly.jsp?link=/article/05/11/04/45OPsecadvise_1.html

Good quote from the article:

"As a security professional, my friend often attends security conferences and teaches security classes. She noted that the number of passwords she collected in these venues was higher on average than in non-security locations. The very people who are supposed to know more about security than anyone appeared to have a higher-than-normal level of remote access back to their companies, but weren't using any type of password protection."

Wow.