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

Time values and summaries


In this section, we'll take a look at how to change the time settings for packets and troubleshooting with the time column.

We have the PBS packet capture again, where I opened the browser and went to http://www.pbs.org/. If you notice in the packet capture, the second column says Time:

The Time column is a number with a decimal and it just keeps counting up as you scroll down through the packet capture. By default, in Wireshark, this is the time since the capture started. Having the time since it was captured can be useful so you know when certain packets arrive in relation to the entire data flow that you captured, but it's not all that useful for trying to diagnose a problem where there might be a delay in a certain service returning traffic that you're trying to capture back to your system.

In order to figure out the delay between captured packets, you'd have to look at the Time column and figure it out based on milliseconds, microseconds, and nanoseconds, and...