Making an ugly Ethernet tap

A long time ago, I saw this in the Hak5 store. After reading about it in mossmann's blog, I found somewhat interesting that using this easily built device you can HACK THE PLANET.

An ethernet tap is a passive device used to monitor traffic between two hosts using a third one. For more info on network taps read here.

The idea behind it is very simple, but in order to understand it we must first understand how data is transmitted through the ethernet cable. The ethernet cable, commonly called Cat 5 contains four pairs of twisted wires. 100BASE-TX (fast ethernet) only uses two pairs of these wires, one pair for transmitting data (TX) and one for receiving (RX). So, in order to intercept the data sent from one of the hosts, we just need to connect the host's TX line with our RX one. Likewise, to intercept incoming data to the host, we need to connect the host's RX line with our RX line.

Note that we can't connect both the host's TX and RX in the same RX line, since fast ethernet is full duplex. To overcome this we need to use two taps, one for the received data and one for the transmitted.

For more details on how to make one, read these two posts: #1 #2

After a bit of soldering, this is what I ended up with.

The two ports near the euro coin are to be connected on the pc and the router, while the other two ports are for intercepting the traffic. As stated previously, one is for the transmitted data and the other for the received. To use them both at once, you need either a pc with two network cards or an ethernet to usb adapter.