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."

Comments

spoken like a true *nix fan

[necrogram]

Because our mailboxes were full of users' requests for Windows porting and our antispam filter started to get confused.

Thats one way to deal with windows people

Re:N o Link?

[Per Wigren]

Where is the link to ettercap?

Here it is!

Re:Well, I have never liked ettercap

[kentmartin]

I agree re: ethereal.

I don't know why it wasn't linked to in the article, but here you go:

Homepage: http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/
Description: A suite for man in the middle attacks and network mapping

Good summary, this time

[YetAnotherName]

All too often, software announcements mention just the name of the item and not what it is or why it's interesting. As an example, compare this recent summary for Zope.

Not everyone's heard of Ettercap; this summary says what it is (network protocol analyzer) and also why it's important (in top ten of security tools). I hope to see more summaries of this caliber on Slashdot.

Re:Well, I have never liked ettercap

[NicolaiBSD]

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.

Top 75 Security Tools

[Noksagt]

The other top tools.

Network Analizer... duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Ettercap is evil :)

It's more of a hacking tool than a network analizer. It allows you to sniff switched networks, perform man-in-the-middle-attacks, it looks for passwords, etc.

Re:Network Analizer... duh

[slasher999]

I tend to agree. Ettercap is a tool I've played with and it has helped me to understand some new concepts, but I haven't really found a good use for it in my day to day Sr Sys Adm career. Other "grey" tools however, such as ethereal and nmap, I wouldn't be without. As the authors pointed out, it's not the tools that are evil.

Interesting comment

[Anonymous Coward]

We chose the GPL because it's the most used, so it has to be the best.

I have a nice Windows XP CD to sell you, guys.

--
Glass, total pwnage.

I love ettercap...

[wschalle]

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.

The fact that it's a *NIX program

[Lifewish]

"anyone care to justify this application, which seems to be yet another blackhat/script kiddy tool?"

Anyone who's smart enough to use it effectively deserves results :)

Seriously, a swiss army knife for kiddies is by definition a swiss army knife for security testers and system managers. I'd prefer for hacking tools to be available for all rather than just for the malicious portion of the online population.

Try it with the new UBCD

[Leigh13]

The new 3.0 release of the excellent Ultimate Boot CD has Ettercap included with the INSERT live CD. If you're a Windows user, it's an easy way to boot into Linux and try it out without having to worry about compiling and what not.