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

Expert system usage


In this section, we'll take a look at the expert system in Wireshark, which is a great feature that not many people know about, and it allows you to easily find problems in a packet capture.

You can follow along with the capture that I'll use by downloading the same one off of the Wireshark website. There's a great section of their wiki called SampleCaptures that allows you to download captures that have been submitted by the community:

What we'll do is search for errors, and the first one that comes up is cmp-in-http-with-errors-in-cmp-protocol.pcap.gz. If you download that and extract it, you can open up the pcap file and follow along:

Here, we have our pcap file from the wiki, and there are two ways to get to the expert system. The first way is from the Analyze menu. We click on Analyze, and go to Expert Information:

The second method is in the bottom left. As you can see in the following screenshot, it is a yellow colored icon:

This icon color will change based on the...