Back in my days of Penetration Testing, one of the tricks in my bag was to do just that... dress up as a janitor (with a laptop Sniffer concealed in my cleaning kit), waltz right in and start checking for a comm closet. One trace file and the network was well compromised. Prior to this, we ALWAYS completed a Non- Disclosure agreement with the client. Our legal eagles would not let us proceed without one. My 02 centavos is that yes, it is surely unethical, if not illegal and to proceed without one is asking for legal hassles of the painful variety. MJ -----Original Message----- From: Carl Friedberg [mailto:friedbergat_private] Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2000 9:26 PM To: 'Crumrine, Gary L'; firewall-wizardsat_private Subject: RE: Legal question I am not familiar with any of the statutes which define wiretapping and protected communications. However, given "convergence" of telecommunications and data communications, and voice over IP (VOIP), at the very least, (assuming you did NOT have any permission to hook up the sniffer) you would probably have to discard the VOIP without looking at it... I would imagine that if you did not have a legitimate reason for snooping the data, you could be in for some legal troubles (ie. theft of trade secrets comes to mind)... I'm sure it depends on circumstances. Are you an ISP trouble-shooting a connection from that network? Probably allowed, but you would have to be careful about what you did with the packet data. I would hope that this is covered in a contract between the ISP/IPP and the customer... Are you a competitor who bribed someone to let you into a wireroom with the sniffer? I think you get the drift... Just my 2 cents, carlat_private -----Original Message----- From: Crumrine, Gary L [mailto:CrumrineGLat_private] Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 5:51 AM To: firewall-wizardsat_private Subject: Legal question After wearing out my fingers during a heated conversation with another colleague over legalities of certain actions, a question came up in my mind concerning sniffers and their usage. If a sniffer was placed on the outside of a given network, and was configured to sniff packets coming from that network only, does this constitute an illegal wire tap? And do the same rules apply to data as they do voice? In some cases it transits the same copper wire... ouch I am getting a headache..
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:58:24 PDT