Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition

TCP/IP Hijacking

TCP/IP hijacking is a clever technique that uses spoofed packets to take over a connection between a victim and a host machine. This technique is exceptionally useful when the victim uses a one-time password to connect to the host machine. A one-time password can be used to authenticate once and only once, which means that sniffing the authentication is useless for the attacker.

To carry out a TCP/IP hijacking attack, the attacker must be on the same network as the victim. By sniffing the local network segment, all of the details of open TCP connections can be pulled from the headers. As we have seen, each TCP packet contains a sequence number in its header. This sequence number is incremented with each packet sent to ensure that ...