WinSniff 1.6 Download

WinSniff is the basic network packets sniffer for Windows developed using Winpcap library. It displays all the packets that are transmitted on the local network and gives detailed information about each header in the packet. In order to keep it simple, I am not dealing with application level protocols. If you are interested, you can add features to support various application level protocols such as SMTP, FTP, NETBIOS etc.

When your machine is on the network, packets with different destinations arrive. By default (i.e., when the network adapter is in normal mode) these packets are rejected by the network adapter since they are intended to different hosts. But if you want, you can receive these packets by putting the network adapter in promiscuous mode. In this mode, it will accept all the packets irrespective of the destination address. Hence you can analyze the packets transmitted on your network.

This trick is used for network management to determine the network traffic... etc. However, there is one problem here...!!! You will receive the packets with different destinations if you are using HUB. Since, HUB uses broadcasting technique for transmitting packets to all the hosts attached to it. However, if you are using SWITCH (an intelligent device), then you won't receive any packet sent to other hosts on the network. Best place to install this application is on the gateway where you can keep track of incoming and outgoing packets.