Coolest program I've run across today

I spent part of the day reading Wireless Hacks in hopes of building a sweet antenna to score free wireless in Palo Alto (or at least for the BAMF factor). Before the antenna section, they had a list of some software that would be useful: Kismet, Wireshark, aircrack-ng, tcpdump... the standards.

Then they showed Driftnet, a simple program that passively listens for traffic, scans for images (JPEG and GIF), and displays the images as it finds them.



It's a really simple concept, but is a lot more interesting than following TCP streams in Wireshark. The book mentioned a really cool use for this too: keep people honest by putting this in a public location. Would you surf racy web sites from work if you knew all the images would show up in the reception area? I mean, I would, but that's what tunneling traffic over http is for :) </nerd>

Driftnet was pretty easy to set up on my system (Ubuntu 7.10). Because you're building form source, you need build-essential and gcc and all that good junk, plus gtk-config, libgif/libungif, libjpeg. Play around with `apt-cache search` until you find the appropriate packages to allow you build.

I'm not going to get into an ethics discussion, but don't worry: this is passive capturing as far as I can tell, and as such is undetectable over wireless (despite what some Chief Information Security Officers would have you believe)