Book Image

Mastering Wireshark 2

By : Andrew Crouthamel
Book Image

Mastering Wireshark 2

By: Andrew Crouthamel

Overview of this book

Wireshark, a combination of a Linux distro (Kali) and an open source security framework (Metasploit), is a popular and powerful tool. Wireshark is mainly used to analyze the bits and bytes that flow through a network. It efficiently deals with the second to the seventh layer of network protocols, and the analysis made is presented in a form that can be easily read by people. Mastering Wireshark 2 helps you gain expertise in securing your network. We start with installing and setting up Wireshark2.0, and then explore its interface in order to understand all of its functionalities. As you progress through the chapters, you will discover different ways to create, use, capture, and display filters. By halfway through the book, you will have mastered Wireshark features, analyzed different layers of the network protocol, and searched for anomalies. You’ll learn about plugins and APIs in depth. Finally, the book focuses on pocket analysis for security tasks, command-line utilities, and tools that manage trace files. By the end of the book, you'll have learned how to use Wireshark for network security analysis and configured it for troubleshooting purposes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributor
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Installing Wireshark 2
Index

Annotating and printing packets


In this section, we'll take a look at the following subtopics:

  • How to use the new annotation feature, also known as comments
  • How to find packets that have annotations, and there are multiple ways of doing so
  • How to print packets

Now, let's get some packets to work with. I'm going to start a quick capture.

To create comments for a packet capture, the entire capture itself, you can do so in the bottom left-hand corner of Wireshark. You see there are two icons down there: one's a circle icon called the expert information we'll get into in a future section, and there's a pencil with a packet capture icon. If you do a mouseover on a pencil icon, it'll say Open the Capture File Properties dialog:

Click on that and it will open up a pop-up window that gives you a bunch of different information for the capture itself. And there's a bottom section here that says File Comment, and here you can enter whatever sort of description you want for the entire packet capture. So maybe...