What is WireShark?

What is WireShark? What this essential tool does and how to use.?

Worrying about how to analyze your network packets for troubleshooting. ? Or looking forward to know about what is WireShark. So, here you will find your answer with bit detail. WireShark is the world’s foremost network data packet analyzer. It is an essential troubleshooting tool for security professional as well as systems administrator. This is free and open source network protocol analyzer that enables you to interactively analyze network traffic in real time. It’s development project was started under the name Ethereal, but was renamed WireShark in early 2006.

WireShark is a standard industrial protocol, basically it is the continuation of project that started in 1998. To make this development hundreds of developers across the globe participated in it. It is still under an active development to provide the user as many features as possible in order to analyze and troubleshoot the captured data. WireShark is used in many educational institutions and other industrial sectors.

What does WireShark do? – Data Packet Analyzer

As stated earlier that WireShark is an analyzer that intercepts data traffic and then converts that captured binary traffic into human-readable format. Converting into the readable format makes you able to easily understand what type of traffic is passing through the captioned network. It tells you many more things that we usually don’t see – What type of traffic is it , size of packet , connection type – port/protocol i.e. TCP, UDP or ICMP and the latency between the certain hops.

This software tool also helps you to filter the traffic if volume is larger that you are trying to capture from specific part of the network. This capture will only collect the types of traffic that you’re interested in. This display filter will help you to zoom in on the traffic you want to specifically inspect. It also provides more features like search tools, filter bar , colored highlights and much more to make it easy for you in isolating the traffic that you are looking for.

Supported formats of  WireShark:

WireShark supports many different capture file formats, some of most important are listed below,

Tcpdump,
Cisco Secure IDS iplog
Microsoft Network Monitor
NAI Sniffer (compressed and uncompressed)
Sniffer Pro, and NetXray
Network Instruments Observer
Novell LANalyzer
RADCOM WAN or LAN Analyzer

How to use WireShark for Analyzing?

Before downloading this data packet  analyzer, you should need to know about what is normal to find in the captures and what is abnormal. Ans also WireShark includes tools to create baseline statistics. Since it’s only a network protocol analyzer but not an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), it can never helps us to destroy the malicious traffic itself. Yes makes you enable what wrong is going on in zeroing the problematic traffic once an abnormally have been raised in the network.

WireShark will also helps us to intercept and analyze encrypted TLS traffic. Usually for every session , browser keeps the symmetric session keys, and using appropriate browser settings, an administrator can load those session keys into WireShark and fully examine the unencrypted web traffic.

This software works in graphical to visualize the statistics. This makes an easy to present the finding about analyzing to his or her less-technical management.

What are the WireShark tutorial.?

There are lots of free available resources on how to learn WireShark or how it works including the tips and tricks to get the most use of this software. Few are listed below for your references.

• Have you downloaded WireShark… Now What? (PDF)
• Wireshark User’s Guide
• Need to know how to Use WireShark: A Complete Tutorial guide (Lifewire)

WireShark free download

Download WireShark – a Network protocol analyzer at wireshark.org and start sniffing packets today.