describing a situation in which the use of sniffers for a cyber-attack would cause a serious problem for an organization. Describe the countermeasures for preventing the attack, detecting the attack, or recovering from the attack. This assignment written using APA style. Sniffers A sniffer is a program or device that can monitor data traveling over a network. Sniffers can be used both for legitimate network management functions and for stealing information. Unauthorized sniffers can be extremely dangerous to a network’s security, because they are virtually impossible to detect and can be inserted almost anywhere. This makes them a favorite weapon in the hacker’s arsenal. Sniffers often work on TCP/IP networks, where they’re sometimes called packet sniffers. Sniffers add risk to the network, because many systems and users send information on local networks in clear text. A sniffer program shows all the data going by, including passwords, the data inside files—such as word-processing documents—and screens full of sensitive data from applications.