MITRE description

Adversaries may passively sniff network traffic to capture information about an environment, including authentication material passed over the network. Network sniffing refers to using the network interface on a system to monitor or capture information sent over a wired or wireless connection. An adversary may place a network interface into promiscuous mode to passively access data in transit over the network, or use span ports to capture a larger amount of data. Data captured via this technique may include user credentials, especially those sent over an insecure, unencrypted protocol. Techniques for name service resolution poisoning, such as [Name Resolution Poisoning and SMB Relay](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1557/001), can also be used to capture credentials to websites, proxies, and internal systems by redirecting traffic to an adversary. Network sniffing may reveal configuration details, such as running services, version numbers, and other network characteristics (e.g. IP addresses, hostnames, VLAN IDs) necessary for subsequent [Lateral Movement](https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0008) and/or [Stealth](https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0005) activities. Adversaries may likely also utilize network sniffing during [Adversary-in-the-Middle](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1557) (AiTM) to passively gain additional knowledge about the environment. In cloud-based environments, adversaries may still be able to use traffic mirroring services to sniff network traffic from virtual machines. For example, AWS Traffic Mirroring, GCP Packet Mirroring, and Azure vTap allow users to define specified instances to collect traffic from and specified targets to send collected traffic to.(Citation: AWS Traffic Mirroring)(Citation: GCP Packet Mirroring)(Citation: Azure Virtual Network TAP) Often, much of this traffic will be in cleartext due to the use of TLS termination at the load balancer level to reduce the strain of encrypting and decrypting traffic.(Citation: Rhino Security Labs AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring)(Citation: SpecterOps AWS Traffic Mirroring) The adversary can then use exfiltration techniques such as Transfer Data to Cloud Account in order to access the sniffed traffic.(Citation: Rhino Security Labs AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring) On network devices, adversaries may perform network captures using [Network Device CLI](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1059/008) commands such as `monitor capture`.(Citation: US-CERT-TA18-106A)(Citation: capture_embedded_packet_on_software)

KEV CVEs mapped to this technique

MITRE CTID maps these KEV CVEs to this technique by hand. They are the actively exploited vulnerabilities behind this technique's KEV signal.

Research citing this technique

Reports and advisories from the last 90 days that cite this technique.

2026-10-28 Cisco Talos: Inside KeyDrift: Analyzing historical UAT-11473 activity on Cisco SD-WAN

Detection coverage

SigmaHQ community rules

Network Sniffing - Linux (core)
Network Sniffing - MacOs (core)
Cisco Sniffing (core)
Windows Pcap Drivers (core)
Potential Packet Capture Activity Via Start-NetEventSession - ScriptBlock (core)
New Network Trace Capture Started Via Netsh.EXE (core)
Harvesting Of Wifi Credentials Via Netsh.EXE (core)
PktMon.EXE Execution (core)
Potential Network Sniffing Activity Using Network Tools (core)

Elastic and Splunk rules

AWS EC2 Full Network Packet Capture Detected (elastic)
Azure VNet Full Network Packet Capture Enabled (elastic)
Suspicious Network Tool Launch Detected via Defend for Containers (elastic)
Suspicious Network Tool Launched Inside A Container (elastic)
Network Traffic Capture via CAP_NET_RAW (elastic)
Cisco ASA - Packet Capture Activity (splunk)
Windows Network Sniffing Tool Executed (splunk)
Cisco SNMP Community String Configuration Changes (splunk)

Signal counts reflect the current corpus snapshot. Research citations are the technique IDs named in vendor reports and government advisories from the last 90 days; KEV mappings come from MITRE CTID. Coverage is the SigmaHQ rule inventory (core, emerging-threats, threat-hunting) at release r2026-07-01 plus Elastic and Splunk production rules. Rule bodies are not mirrored; links go upstream.