Effective Sniffing Tool : Wireshark (part I)

Wireshark is the world's foremost network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network. It is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions.

For non-pro users, Wireshark can be a learning tool which is able to inspect all the packets being transferred to and from the wireless device.

Packets are the bundle of datas that are transferred from the wireless device to the client computers and they contain everything transferred. Yes everything means all the passwords & username you submit too. The thing you need to know is how to capture those datas.

Wireshark development thrives thanks to the contributions of networking experts across the globe. It is the continuation of a project that started in 1998.

Features

Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:

1. Deep inspection of hundreds of protocals, with more being added all the time
2. Live capture and offline analysis
3. Standard three-pane packet browser
4. Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
5. Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
6. The most powerful display filters in the industry
7. Rich VoIP analysis
8. Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer® (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer® Pro, and NetXray®, Network Instruments Observer, NetScreen snoop, Novell LANalyzer, RADCOM WAN/LAN Analyzer, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, Tektronix K12xx, Visual Networks Visual UpTime, WildPackets EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, and many others
9. Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
10. Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)
11. Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
12. Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
13. Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text.

In this post I have just mentiones about Wireshark and some of it's features. In my next post I am going to tell you how to operate wireshark. So don't forget to visit next time. Till then good bye.