Sniffers?
 

any advice on where I can find a freeware Packet sniffer thats "moron friendly" for sniffing ICQ/AIM/Yahoo/ or any other messaging service...

I could care less about webpages, e-mail, passwords, or anything personal...

lets just say I have a personal matter to settle with my Home network.

I'm quite computer literate.. just not down to a programming level and the closest I can get to a freeware version is crap that comes out in either binary code, hex code, or a string of commands the size of king fucking kong.


freeware cause I'm a poor broke college student

ethereal is about as close as you're gonna get to something decent.

Remember, these just decode what is going on, and gives you a dump of whatever is going accross the wire. Don't expect voodoo magic, because you ain't getting it.

Let it run for a while, try to find out the AIM ports (probably a google search will give them to you), and have it only grab stuff on that, when you are done, look at it through the ASCII viewer, it should give you everything that was said in the IM session, (plus a lot of annoying garbage in the protocol).

Ethereal is the big one I know about. Its pretty industrial strength, but like said, its not voodoo magic. In addition to the info going back and forth, you are going to get the SYN/ACK messages, headers, everything. Theres a lot of data going back and forth that you dont think about.

As for the page of commands, any tool like that is going to have one. Sniffers are something built by people who know computers *for* people who know computers. Most of the more powerful programs are like that.

I haven't been able to run Ethereal for a few months so I'm a bit rusty, but you can filter out other items. I think I remember seeing Ethereal tell me what was being sent and such. I'll look at it more tonight, can't really right now.

Ethereal is probably the best thing out there for a Windows-based machine. It's fairly easy to use and you can filter for certain protocols and packet types (like filtering everything that isn't AIM related). It will capture ALL data, however, so it can be pretty overwhelming at first.

Also note that you'll need to install a PCAP driver for Windows (you can get it from the Ethereal page) before it'll work.

Let me be the first to recant my previous post.

There is a program out there that does this exact voodoo magic that you want, I just remembered about it because I am using it during a mailserver transition to get all of the users passwords so that I can put them in to the new server.

It's called dsniff. It's typically a linux program, but there appears to be a fairly active windows port of it. Search on google for the directions to run it, it looks like you might need to install some special drivers. All I needed to do was "apt-get install dsniff", why are things so much harder on Windows? ;)

There is aimsniff for linux that will show you AIM messages in a way that is useful. If you dont have linux knoppix-std.org live disc has aimsniff on it.

Anyone know a quickstart guide for Ethereal?

What to download/install along with Ethereal (Win XP)?

How to set it up.

For Ethereal, the download location should have the Win32 binaries and also the WinPCap drivers as well - you need to download and install those.

After that, launch Ethereal, select Capture, pick the right interface, and off you go.