The file ettercap.exe, known as EtterCap sniffer, belongs to software The EtterCap sniffer by the EtterCap community. EtterCap is a comprehensive suite for 'man in the middle' (MiiM) attacks on a Local area network (LAN). Miim is a form of active eavesdropping where the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking in a private connection. Ettercap can intercept traffic on the network segment and capture passwords or eavesdrop against a number of common protocols. It provides attacker-style features like password filters, sniffing of live connections, and content filtering on the fly, and functions by putting the network interface into a promiscuous mode and by ARP poisoning of the target machines. ARP poisoning or spoofing is a technique where an attacker sends fake ARP messages into the LAN to associate the attacker's address with the IP address of another host, causing the traffic meant for that IP address to be sent to the attacker.

Most non-system processes that are running can be stopped because they are not involved in running your operating system. ettercap.exe. is used by EtterCap sniffer, If you shut down ettercap.exe, it will likely start again at a later time either after you restart your computer or after an application start. To stop ettercap.exe, permanently you need to uninstall the application that runs this process which in this case is EtterCap sniffer, from your system.

After uninstalling applications it is a good idea to scan you Windows registry for any left over traces of applications. Registry Reviver by ReviverSoft is a great tool for doing this.

The ReviverSoft experts have not yet reviewed ettercap.exe

A process usually a part of an installed application such as EtterCap sniffer, or your operating system that is responsible for running in functions of that application. Some application require that they have processes running all the time so they can do things such as check for updates or notify you when you get an instant message. Some poorly written applications have many processes that run that may not be required and take up valuable processing power within your computer.

We have not received any complaint about this process having higher than normal impact on PC performance. If you have had bad experiences with it please let us know in a comment below and we will investigate it further.

The first thing you should do if ettercap.exe. is causing errors on your computer is to run a Windows registry scan with Registry Reviver If you are still seeing errors after this you should uninstall the program that ettercap.exe, belongs to, in this case EtterCap sniffer