Sniffing is easiest hacking techniques: What is it and how to prevent such attacks?

The types of cyber-attacks are increasing with each day. Fraudsters are using newer techniques to fool people and steal their money. One of the easiest hacking techniques is Sniffing. In this type of attack, the fraudsters use the process of monitoring and capturing all data packets that are passing through a computer network using packet sniffers. Packet Sniffers are used by network administrators to keep track of data traffic passing through their network. 

Sonit Jain, CEO of GajShield Infotech shares few precautions that can help enhance your data security and prevent sniffing attacks. 

Preventing sniffing attacks 

You can prevent sniffing attacks by taking a few precautionary measures that can make it challenging for the hackers to either tap into your network traffic or peek into the data that is being transmitted. 

Encrypt your Communication with a VPN 

Sniffing attacks are performed to collect information that is transmitted over the network. Hence you can prevent sniffing attacks by encrypting all the communication that is received or sent over your network. Encrypting communication will increase security and prevent sniffing attacks as cybercriminals will have to decrypt the packet to get the information they want. You can use secure VPN services to encrypt your communications. 

Route public WiFi requests to head office firewall 

Connecting to unsecured networks can increase chances of sniffing attacks, but in this age when remote working is becoming the norm, it is challenging to monitor every connection request. Leveraging services that can route all network requests to your head office firewall can help you prevent sniffing attacks through unsecured networks. For instance, you can use an Enterprise Cloud solution that can route all the network requests to your head office firewall, where you can apply security policies and protocols to all the requests and secure your connection. 

These are some of the ways to prevent data leaks caused by sniffing attacks. You can also use context-based data leak prevention solution to further improve your data security. Context-based data leak prevention firewall can create context around your data for deep inspection and complete control over data packets.