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I know that you can sniff data which is transferred over wifi. Can you do that with broadband (wired)? And how can you secure the network, so nobody could sniff data both over wifi, and broadband?

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It depends on the broadband technology being used. Generally, for most residential fiber and cable systems, about 32 or so houses share the same passive distribution network. As such, the information coming from the ISP goes to all 32 customers and the cable modem filters down the information for each customer. Using a hacked cable modem, it is possible to monitor all the traffic coming from the ISP, but it may or may not be encrypted depending on how the ISP is configured.

Similarly, traffic going to the ISP is moving in the wrong direction and can't be easily detected by other customers.

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    @evening - you lost me now. If you are asking about people on a wired network within the home network, a good switching based router should isolate each system and only pass along information that needs to go to each IP internally. As long as it isn't going through any hubs (which send to all connections) you should be fine internally.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 19:10
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    If your home router has a switch built in (as most do) then people on port 1 cannot directly read the traffic bound for port 2. That doesn't mean a clever person couldn't do all sorts of tricks to make it possible, but you know your housemates better than we do.
    – John Deters
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 19:27
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    @evening - you can make it so that wifi uses different encryption per connection, but this requires user level accounts for connecting to the wireless and the use of the enterprise levels of WPA or similar. It is also non-trivial to setup. With a common password, anyone with access to the network will be able to get at the contents of everyone else (on the wireless network)'s packets as they go across the wireless network.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 19:49
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    @evening - it is probably your easiest bet for a wireless connection if you don't trust the other people on the wireless network, but at that point it brings up the question, why are they on your wireless network.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 20:04
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    @evening - wireless encryption I already answered. Encryption won't protect you from other people who are legitimately on the network unless you use enterprise level encryption (which is hard to setup) and authentication just establishes that people should be able to be on the network.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Sep 13, 2013 at 21:14

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