The men behind ettercap-NG
An anonymous reader writes "In 2001 two Italians released the first beta version of ettercap, a network protocol analyzer. Ettercap is now covered in most security books. It's number 9 in the Top 75 Security Tools list of the Nmap Hackers mailing list. This summer they released ettercap-NG, which was completely rewritten from scratch with better, modular code, making it easier to add new features and write and submit patches. NewsForge recently caught up with its authors for an Interview."
You're comparing apples and oranges. Ettercap is not just a packet dumping/protocol analyzer tool like tcpdump. It has many active features, like arp-cache poisoning, data injection etc.
Its man in the middle feature lets me catch botnets on my college campus (I work in the IT dept.) and shut them down immediately.