Stories about: Sniffer

Expressing a now-familiar theme, a Microsoft executive at the ApacheCon conference on Friday morning touted Microsoft's efforts to be more open, highlighting moves such as offering the company's "M" modeling language under the Microsoft "Open Specification Promise."

Version 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools.

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22 per cent annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

Ten great free network management tools were recently showcased. Readers responded with some of their own favorites, so I'm going to take a look at those tools and report on their capabilities and usage from my perspective as an experienced network manager.

Weak encryption used by Microsoft's wireless keyboards can be cracked in a matter of moments, a pair of Swiss security researchers said this week, giving hackers a way to snatch passwords and financial account information in real-time and from a distance.

Network-based intrusion-detection systems (IDS) are an integral component of a layered IT security strategy. As October is National Cyber Awareness Month, if your overall security system doesn't include network-based intrusion detection, now is an excellent time to consider implementing an IDS package.

If we had to pick the most significant trend in networking today, the VoIP phenomenon might well top the list. And open source is playing no small part. While enterprises remain reluctant to rip out their tried-and-true PBXes, open source VoIP -- usually in the form of Asterisk -- is capturing business communications one small business or branch office at a time. Sooner or later, enterprises too will catch the open source VoIP bug. The cost savings and flexibility are too compelling to resist.

Sourcefire, the security firm that oversees the open source intrusion-detection system software, Snort, is making available another open source tool for network traffic logging.

A few years back, I used an old 486 running Red Hat Linux and tcpdump to easily diagnose a client's denial-of-service attack, illustrating the benefits of creating a powerful network analysis tool from "scrap" parts. There are plenty of tools to build a similar Windows-based network analyzer, but Linux can run on machines that can't efficiently run Windows.