WLAN question

[gEEEk]

I have a question that is driving me crazy.

How come I cant pickup traffic from a network, even though I am not connected to it. I picture the traffic as packets flying through the air, from router to computer or computer to computer and vice versa. But how come that an outsider that is not connected to the network, cant pickup these packets flying through the air? It may sound nuts, and I agree... But I need to figure this out..

/gEEEk

[vector]

you can surely capture wireless traffic from a network that youre not connected too. if its not encrypted or if you have the encryption key you can even decode it in real time and see what people are doing online, without ever being associated. i use commview for wifi in windows for doing this, but im sure other people use other apps, commview dosnt deem to be very popular not alot of people are familiar with it, but its one of my favorite apps.

[H@L0_F00]

Wireshark can capture packets via Wifi or LAN. You can specify which type of files to capture which comes in handy when monitoring Wifi traffic so you don't pickup all broadcast packets. You can also sort the packets that you did collect by MAC, Destination IP, Source IP, etc.

Chris did a three part series on packet sniffing that I would recommend you start off watching from beginning to end to get a short intro to the fun of packet sniffing ;)

1. Episode 406: http://www.hak5.org/episodes/episode-406-p...ns-with-synergy

2. Episode 408: http://www.hak5.org/episodes/episode-408

3. Episode 409: http://www.hak5.org/episodes/episode-409