slave wrote:
I believe you.
Unless one is a professional or a
very serious amateur, all a person can do is use reasonable precautions and hope for the best, it seems to me.

You can use regular Antivirus software, if you are a private citizen, the chance of you being a target by NSA TAO or any other nation state similar specialist group is
close to zero -
not to hurt your feelings, but you are uninteresting to that kind of people.
If you are a professional, then you
assume that you can be, or are compromised and only do your work on specific machines. I only do my work - at work (duuh), anyone compromising my home box will only find lesbian pr0n and my steam games collection (enjoy).
The probability that you will be able to identify malicious code using a sniffer given your current skills is also close to zero, take my advice - get some good AV software that also block crap in your browser.
Then start learning about viruses, trojans, adware and how browsers are a primary vector of infection nowadays - when you have enough skill to know what to look for, then you will start finding things.