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

Running Wireshark from a command line


In this section, we'll take a look at how to run Wireshark from a command line and explore some of the command-line options and how you might use them. The first thing I want to do is open up a Command Prompt, and then we'll browse where Wireshark is. Unless you have Wireshark in your system variable, you won't be able to simply type wireshark and have that function.

So what we'll have to do is go to its location. In my system, it's back in program files and in the wiresharkdirectory. And if we type dir, we'll see Wireshark.exe, as well as some of the other tools that we'll talk about later, such as tshark:

What we'll do is run Wireshark.exe; then, if you press Enter, it will open up Wireshark, just like if you were to click on the icon. If you type Wireshark.exe -h, it will provide the output of all the variables and arguments that Wireshark has available to it:

If we scroll up, we'll see the version of Wireshark we're running and a dump of all the variables...