sniffing network sniffers allow you to see packets entering and exiting target machine as resultthey have many practical uses before and after exploitation in some casesyou'll be able to use wireshark (in the next neverthelessthere' an advantage to knowing how to throw together quick sniffer to view and decode network traffic writing tool like this will also give you deep appreciation for the mature tools that can painlessly take care of the finer points with little effort on your part you will also likely pick up some new python techniques and perhaps better understanding of how the low-level networking bits work in the previous we covered how to send and receive data using tcp and udpand arguably this is how you will interact with most network services but underneath these higher-level protocols are the fundamental building blocks of how network packets are sent and received you will use raw sockets to access lower-level networking information such as the raw ip and icmp headers in our casewe are only interested in the ip layer and higherso we won' decode any ethernet information of courseif you intend to perform any low-level attacks such as arp poisoning or you are developing wireless assessment toolsyou need to become intimately familiar with ethernet frames and their use let' begin with brief walkthrough of how to discover active hosts on network segment