Book Image

Learn Wireshark, - Second Edition

By : Lisa Bock
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn Wireshark, - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Lisa Bock

Overview of this book

Wireshark is a popular and powerful packet analysis tool that helps network administrators investigate latency issues and potential attacks. Over the years, there have been many enhancements to Wireshark’s functionality. This book will guide you through essential features so you can capture, display, and filter data with ease. In addition to this, you’ll gain valuable tips on lesser-known configuration options, which will allow you to complete your analysis in an environment customized to suit your needs. This updated second edition of Learn Wireshark starts by outlining the benefits of traffic analysis. You’ll discover the process of installing Wireshark and become more familiar with the interface. Next, you’ll focus on the Internet Suite and then explore deep packet analysis of common protocols such as DNS, DHCP, HTTP, and ARP. The book also guides you through working with the expert system to detect network latency issues, create I/O and stream graphs, subset traffic, and save and export captures. Finally, you’ll understand how to share captures using CloudShark, a browser-based solution for analyzing packet captures. By the end of this Wireshark book, you’ll have the skills and hands-on experience you need to conduct deep packet analysis of common protocols and network troubleshooting as well as identify security issues.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1 Traffic Capture Overview
6
Part 2 Getting Started with Wireshark
11
Part 3 The Internet Suite TCP/IP
16
Part 4 Deep Packet Analysis of Common Protocols
21
Part 5 Working with Packet Captures

Understanding the phases of packet analysis

Packet analysis is the process of gathering traffic on the network, decoding it and dissecting the raw bits, and presenting it in a human-readable format for analysis, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 2.6 – The phases of packet analysis

Regardless of the software used, there are four main phases of packet analysis: gather, decode, display, and analyze. In this section, we’ll review each of the phases, starting with the first step, gather, where we collect the data from the network.

Gathering network traffic

When you launch Wireshark, a welcome screen displays a list of available network connections on your current device. In most cases, you will have more than one interface. To begin capturing immediately, you can select an active sparkline and begin the capture.

Alternatively, you can go to the Capture menu, and then go to the Options tab. This will open the following window:

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