In Boston, Massachusetts, network administrator Daniel Carter is monitoring the IT infrastructure of New England...

The scenario emphasizes that Daniel “begins capturing and reviewing live network traffic” to identify unauthorized session behaviors. In CEH-aligned network analysis practice, the most direct method to confirm session hijacking when you already have a packet capture is manual packet analysis using packet sniffing tools. By inspecting live traffic, Daniel can correlate sessions, verify whether multiple sources are reusing the same session identifiers, identify abnormal TCP sequence and acknowledgment behavior, and detect patterns such as duplicated cookies/tokens, replayed requests, inconsistent client IP or user-agent shifts, or sudden session reuse across hosts. This approach provides evidentiary detail beyond an alert and allows validation before escalation.

An IDS can be helpful, but it is a detection system that generates alerts based on signatures or anomalies; it does not inherently “confirm” the issue unless it provides clear supporting evidence, and the question specifically frames Daniel’s action as hands-on traffic review. Checking for predictable session tokens is a preventive and diagnostic step for weak session management design, but it does not directly confirm an in-progress hijacking event from observed network behavior. Monitoring for ACK storms can indicate certain TCP-level hijacking/desynchronization conditions, but it is narrower and may not apply to application-layer session hijacking, which is far more common in enterprise environments and would be validated by inspecting session identifiers and request flows in the capture.

Therefore, given the described workflow and the need to confirm unauthorized session activity from live traffic, CEH methodology aligns best with manual packet analysis using sniffing tools.