An attacker monitoring network traffic between nodes of a public or multicast network. The attacker need not be able to prevent reception or change content but must simply be able to observe and read the traffic. The attacker might precipitate or indirectly influence the content of the observed transaction, but the attacker is never the intended recipient of the information. This differs from other sniffing attacks in that it is over a public network rather via some other communications channel, such as radio.