The same goes for setting up your own WiFi network to logging people’s traffic – especially if you create a “fake” hotspot that imitates legit networks. Obviously, using packet sniffing with the intention of stealing login credentials or spying on people’s online habits is normally illegal. What might be legal in one place can be completely illegal in a different region.īut we’re not going to leave you hanging. Unfortunately, it’s not really reliable since it’s pretty old + there’s no clear conclusion.Īs far as we can tell, the only correct answer right now is “it depends.” Each country, county, state, and locality handles packet sniffing in different ways. At most, we managed to find this WIRED article from 2010. If you google “packet sniffing laws,” you won’t really find a lot of information. This process is performed with the help of packet sniffers (also called packet analyzers). For example, someone snooping on your DNS queries is a form of packet sniffing. Packet sniffing is the process of collecting and analyzing all the data packets that pass through a network.

We’ll do our best to make this topic as simple to understand as possible in this quick guide. It’s a topic you’ll hear more and more about in the near future, so it’s a good thing you decided to learn about it right now. Keep hearing about packet sniffing, and don’t know what it is?

Packet sniffing tools