I Love the Smell of Data in the Morning

The topic of this video reminds me when I worked for a Asian based airline in the 90's and my network college was dispatched to Sri Lanka to help assist with repairs to the company's network in the Colombo Airport that had been damaged in a bomb blast (yeah he got all the top gigs). He wanted to take his network "sniffer" with him but wasn't allowed to until he got a re-export license from the US State Dept., so potentially dangerous is this type equipment if used for spying on data traffic. How they work is they sniff TCP/IP packets as they pass by, in our case on an ethernet cable, but no doubt more specialized devices can sniff T1 and fibre optical cables. What makes such devices so insidious is that neither the sender nor the receiver of the data can detect that the data has been "sniffed" as the data does not get diverted, modified, removed or delayed.

by zionget