akaray7181

i'm just starting to read my network+ book and was wondering what and how i would go about doing lan monitoring (malicious and non-malicious) and what anti-sniffing programs there are. I want to know anything you guys are willing to share knowledge wise.

Since, A lot of software online has spyware, I was also wondering what lan monitoring tools and sniffing are actually safe to use? do some of them turn on you and start stealing your ip packets with credit cards?

I have wireshark, and i started using it a little, but i'm not sure i understand what i'm doing with it yet. Like i go into wireshark and then i click list available capture interfaces icon, and then i get broadcom and microsoft listed (both same ip address) and one ms tunnel interface driver and it lists the ip and packets?

how do people use something like this to monitor the lan and what exactly are they looking for? For example, how would they determine, where a faulty cable was by using
this tool? or are there any other uses that you can tell me how to use this for? I need some expert insight.