"What, he saw them on a Skype call with Romerberg Marketplatz in the background?"
You can observe packets by tapping into a network.
White Hat hackers observed packet traffic going to and from the Frankfurt server to Stateside Dominion computers.
I wonder if the White Hats got a tip stating this might happen in order to be in place to monitor the packets. I can tap into a network but I can not observe packets from last week unless it was recorded somewhere (maybe NSA).
A network packet is divided into three parts; the header, payload and trailer, each containing values that are characteristic of it.
Header – The header contains the source address, a destination address, protocol, and packet number.
- Source address indicates where the packet is coming from
- Destination address points to the receiving IP address
- The protocol helps identify what type of packet is being transferred, whether it is an email, a web page, a video, etc.
- The packet number – each packet has two identifying numbers; the first indicating how many packets a piece of information was split into, and the second indicates the place of the individual packet as a part of the complete information.
Parts of a Network Packet