i guess i could look up the term but in laymen’s terms what is packet sniffing?
'Packet sniffing' refers to snooping on someone else's traffic between them and their network or access point. An Ethernet card on a hard-wired network set to 'promiscuous' mode will see all of the packets going across the network. I believe that a wireless card can do the same for traffic between a user and his access point.
Packet sniffing is when somebody has a piece of software on the internet between you and your destination that is copying the data packets going back and forth and storing them for deciphering later. They’re usually looking for login data or better yet banking and credit card info. About the only way around it is encrypted data flow, and even that’s not proof positive.