You might think that what you do on your phone while lying on your bed—messaging your crush, posting memes to annoy people on Instagram—is private and safe. After all, it seems totally private, right? Well, that is until you realize someone with decent networking skills is connected to the same Wi-Fi network as you. Yes, they can actually see and read everything you do on your phone. Wait, what? Is my home network really that vulnerable? How the heck can they do that? Well, to answer your first question, it's not really considered a “vulnerability” because that's just how networking works. As for your second question—Welcome to the world of Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks.

Imagine you're texting someone (maybe a low-budget hooker, or maybe a gay one, whatever works for you), and you're wondering how your message reaches the other person. Well, to understand that, we need to take a look at how your phone connects to Wi-Fi. Every device that connects to the internet—whether it's a phone, laptop, or PC—has a unique identifier called a MAC address. This is burned into the device's network card. When you connect to your home Wi-Fi, your router sees your MAC address and stores it in its memory. Every device connected to that same network has its own MAC address stored in the router, which helps the router know where to send data. So, when you send a message, for example, it travels through the air as data packets. I'll explain what these packets are and what they contain later. For now, know that your router receives these packets and knows they're coming from your device because it matches your MAC address. The router then sends it to the correct destination (like, say, the Telegram server where you're messaging your "special" someone). The same thing happens when your friend replies. His router gets the message, sees his MAC address, and sends it to his phone. This whole process happens very quickly, almost instantly.

Now, here's where MITM attackers get involved. They don't hack the messages directly; instead, they position themselves in between you and the server (or your “hooker,” in this case). The trick they use is something called ARP poisoning. Here's how it works: if a hacker is on the same Wi-Fi network, they can change their MAC address to look like the router's. At the same time, they can send false information to the router, making it think that the hacker is the device you're trying to communicate with. In short, when you send a message to your "hooker," the hacker can intercept it, read it, and even change it. They basically become a "man in the middle" between you and the person you're messaging. And yes, they can see everything.

Now, before you get scared and think you're a target, let's look at how this actually works. And then we'll dive into ways you can protect yourself from this kind of attack. I'm going to demonstrate how we can sniff the network using Linux and a tool called Bettercap (don't worry, it works on Windows and macOS too, though the setup might differ). If you're not familiar with Bettercap, it's a powerful tool for sniffing and manipulating network traffic. In the next section, we'll walk through how to set up Bettercap, and later, we'll look at the security steps you can take to stop this kind of attack from happening to you.