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Unhealthy Sniffing
Simon Doring writes "Stefan Esser did it again. Yesterday he reported 13 remote root vulnerabilities in Ethereal. Time to teach all those sniffing kiddies an unhealthy lesson. The next LAN party will be a lot of fun."
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The article makes this clear: Ethereal is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product.
The right way to do passive scanning is with an ethernet cable that has the tx leads removed.
Can't do that with UTP. The link pulse travels over the same wire, so the hub or switch will deactivate the port and you won't see any traffic at all. What you can do is cut the TX pin on the AUI connector when using an external tranceiver, but nobody uses those any more.
In BSD derivatives, you can up an interface without giving it an address, attach to it with bpf and set it in promiscuous mode. You'll see all the traffic on the wire, but none of it will go into the network stack and no outgoing traffic will be generated unless you do it yourself.
(I write network analysis software for a living)