Setting up a spoofing attack with Ettercap

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) spoofing is maybe the most common MITM attack out there. It is based on the fact that the Address Resolution Protocol—the one that translates IP addresses to MAC addresses—does not verify the authenticity of the responses that a system receives. This means that, when Alice's computer asks all devices in the network, "what is the MAC address of the machine with IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx", it will believe the answer it gets from any device, be it the desired server or not so ARP spoofing or ARP poisoning works by sending lots of ARP responses to both ends of the communications chain, telling each one that the attacker's MAC address corresponds to the IP address of their counterpart.

In this recipe, we will use Ettercap to perform an ARP spoofing attack and set ourselves between a client and a web server.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use the client virtual machine we configured in Chapter 1, Setting Up Kali Linux and...