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> who is in a position to tap your connection such that this becomes a serious security concern?

When you use HTTP everything is sent in plain text. This means...

- Anyone on the same network as you can see all of your traffic. This includes company networks, coffee shop wifi, your house, the library; any place that has a WiFi network. Caveat: it's possible to use network isolation to hide your traffic but this is crazy rare to see and typically is done to isolate networks, not individual traffic.

- Your ISP can see and log everything sent over HTTP.

- Anyone at the router level that your traffic passes through. Your traffic makes a lot of hopes over various routers on the internet before making it to your final destination.

Overall it's a terrible idea for anything that needs to be sent securely.




If I have two devices connected to a switch, how can they see each other's traffic?


ARP poisoning[1]. Ettercap lets you do it with a couple of clicks, without any advanced knowledge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_spoofing


Just download Wireshark and you'll have an easy to use tool that'll show you the traffic.


Not by default, only if you do ARP poisoning, which most consumer switches wont guard against.

All you'll see without it is broadcast crap.




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