Introducing Wireshark

Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today. Wireshark is a powerful packet analyzer tool, with an easy-to-use, rich GUI and a command-line utility with very active community support: http://ask.wireshark.org.

Wireshark uses pcap (libpcap) to capture packets, which means it can capture packets in offline mode—to view the captured packets—and online mode (live traffic) to capture and display the traffic in the Wireshark GUI. Once open, the Wireshark GUI looks like this:

Introducing Wireshark

Wireshark features

We will see some of the important features that are available in Wireshark in the following figure:

Wireshark ...

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