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

Determining where to capture


In this section, we'll take a look at determining where best to start a packet capture for the troubleshooting scenario. Now, in this troubleshooting scenario, we have a user that is reporting that they're unable to access the FTP server. They start with their client, and it just says that the connection does not work.

Now, what we need to do is determine where we need to begin packet captures in order to figure out what's going on:

There might be an issue on the client side; there might be an issue on the server side; or there might be an issue somewhere in between on the internet, possibly. Maybe it's a routing issue, or something like that that's out of our control. So besides taking a look at log files on the client or the server, we'll take a look at the packet captures themselves. Additionally, there might be a problem somewhere between the client and the internet, or between the internet and the server. These intermediary devices could be firewalls or routers...