How to monitor what someone else is doing while using your internet connection

3

I gave my network security password to my neighbor so she could get online. How can I tell what she has been doing online or on my computer?

Lauren

Posted 2010-10-14T15:00:12.593

Reputation: 31

Password to what? To your wifi-router or to your computer? – stim – 2010-10-14T15:33:48.107

Most routers usually do show a history of pages visited. What router are you using? – ziggy – 2010-10-14T16:37:22.547

Answers

4

The solution is not for the faint of heart. What you need is something called Wireshark, a network traffic monitor, or some other network traffic monitoring tool. Such tools will give you the ability to look in and see exact request / responses, what sites the person visited, and even open up the data packets to see actual data coming down.

This will NOT work if the user is going to sites that use HTTPS (most email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc., or ecommerce such as Ebay), since all data will be encrypted.

Honestly, your best bet is to talk to the person directly if you are concerned about something. Make friends, be open and clear.

If you're worried about viruses coming through the network or something, you could just set up a separate subnet in the router / firewall for that person (or yourself), preventing network traffic from jumping across.

Joshua

Posted 2010-10-14T15:00:12.593

Reputation: 4 290

1You're forgetting that the persons connection will have to be routed through your machine for that to work. Use Cain & Abel to ARP poison the other person, and then use Wireshark to monitor the traffic going through. If you don't know how ARP poisoning works, it's a man in the middle attack. The victims traffic will be routed to you while you route it to its original destination, thus allowing you to see all of the data. – qroberts – 2010-10-14T17:55:23.353

Actually I've used wireshark and it is able to sniff all packets on the network without having to route through my machine. Just start it up and run the capture, then watch the magic happen. – Joshua – 2010-10-14T21:10:30.017