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

Saving and exporting packets


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

  • How to save packet captures
  • How to save selected sections of packets, individual packets, and ranges of packets
  • How to export packets into other formats
  • How to export raw packet data from the capture that you selected

Now that we have Wireshark up and running, let's capture some traffic. We'll select the Local Area Connection, and we could either double-click as I mentioned or we'll start the capture up at the top. And we will have some packets coming in. So now, if I want to save this capture (the entire capture—all the packets that I just captured) I'll go to File | Save As...; and from here, I can simply choose a filename. So, we'll call it packets. And you'll see in the Save as type, I chose the file as pcapng:

So, pcapng is the next generation of the pcap file extension. It was released with Wireshark 1.8, so it is relatively new and includes some additional features, which we'll get into in future...