I read a blogger bragging that he snuck into a building. He avoided the security cameras. He got off the elevator but could not enter the floor. Instead he pulled out his laptop, ran his WireShark app, and sniffed some wireless network traffic.This dude was proud that he captured all kinds of info on the computer sending the network traffic over the air. A lot of people thought this guy was a n00b, because what he did was nothing special. I disagree. I give him props for using WireShark to extract meaningful data from network traffic he was not familiar with.
I know another guy that tried to show that he could capture the HTML code for a web site, even if the web site programmer tried to prevent it. This other dude installed a copy of WireShark, installed the prerequisite Win P-Cap software, and booted up WireShark. He knew exactly what he was looking for. He only captured the traffic on his own box. However he was still unable to capture the HTML source code for a web page.
This second guy considers himself the ultimate hacker. Guess not. The moral is that WireShark, while powerful, requires some skills to operate. I should know. I used it before to do some password risk analysis. That is a story for another day. However I do respect the guy who could run WireShark on random wireless network traffic and figure out what was going on.
