Sniffing on a wireless network

Sniffing is a technique that is used to observe the traffic on a network as it makes its way from sender to receiver (and back in many cases). Sniffing allows you to capture traffic either in real-time, and distill it through the use of filters, or it can be captured and saved to a file for later analysis and processing. Sniffing is a powerful technique for gaining information about a network and the devices on it, which in turn can be used as a foundation for later activities based on the results achieved.

Note

Notice that I refer to sniffing in the first line of this paragraph as a technique for observing traffic moving across a network. This is an important detail that I feel may be subtle and needs to be pointed out accordingly. Sniffing itself should never be considered something used for performing attacks, lest we become stuck in our thinking that this is all it is good for. In fact, sniffing is a technique that is used every day for completely benign...