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

Preferences


To access Wireshark's preferences, go to Edit | Preferences...; this will open up the Preferences window. On the left, you'll see that there are a number of categories that you can choose from:

Appearance

The first category is Appearance, where you can change a number of settings, including the default folder that you most commonly open files from and the filter entries and recent files values. The filter entries changes the number of filters that appear in the drop-down box at the display filter section. So, right now there's 10, which you'll see once we close this:

You can change this so that it shows more, and that's what that preference does. Additionally, we have recent files, and that's based off of the File menu. If you change that to a higher value, then your Open Recent will show an additional number of recent files. Down near the bottom of this section, you'll see Main toolbar style, and it says Icons only right now. And if you're new to Wireshark, you might have noticed...