SNIFFING

Password sniffing is an attack on the Internet that is used to steal user names and passwords from the network. Today, it is mostly of historical interest, as most protocols nowadays use strong encryption for passwords. However, it used to be the worst security problem on the Internet in the 1990s, when news of major password sniffing attacks were almost weekly.

The password sniffing problem was largely solved by SSH, which replaced several prior insecure protocols. Many other protocols have also introduced encryption or at least hashing of passwords, which makes this attack less practical. However, various other credentials stealing and replay attacks are still widely used. Man-in-the-middle attacks are commonly used for stealing passwords and credentials today.

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