4 ms·
I've no idea what nettby is. But ARP is how computers figure out what IP address is associated with a hardware / ethernet address, so they know what ethernet a
by jcul 3y ago
I've no idea what nettby is.
But ARP is how computers figure out what IP address is associated with a hardware / ethernet address, so they know what ethernet address to use for sending packets to a specific IP.
ARP poisoning means you flood the network with fake ARP packets saying your ethernet address has the gateway IP or whatever IP. So then the other devices will forward packets to your machine instead of the intended destination.
As nettby didn't use HTTPS it would then be trivial to capture / read the packets and figure out everyones' passwords. I.e. the messages would be plain text, unencrypted.
Not exactly Eli5, but hope it helps.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoThis is pretty much the reply I'd write, so I'll just add my endorsement. Couple more tidbits of information: Nettby was a Norwegian Myspace clone and it was all the rage back when I was in middle school(around 2007-2009 or thereabouts). ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol. ARP has no security built in by default. This combined with the plaintext passwords made the attack trivial.
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoYes but isnt this possible only on LANs?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoCorrect. I did this at school. It was early days of students being allowed laptops in class. We weren't actually allowed internet, but the school had an extremely basic wifi network that was WEP encrypted... So naturally I broke out Aircrack-ng and ameliorated that situation. And suddenly everyone was procrastinating on nettby in class.