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

DNS analysis


Let's take a look at how DNS works at a basic level and how to do common tasks with DNS such as look in a Wireshark capture.

We will start by flushing the DNS cache on the computer, which will clear out any of the cached entries on the device so that if we try to resolve any of them, it will have to go get a new resolution from the servers out there on the internet. For this, we will enter the following command:

Since we've cleared that out, let's do a standard resolution.

Before we do a resolution, what DNS does is resolve domain names and different records of these domain names to IP addresses. That's its primary purpose.

DNS is used for all sorts of things, some of which are listed here:

  • Browsing the internet in any fashion, such as with the web
  • If you're trying to resolve FTP servers or game servers
  • If you're trying to run an active directory on a domain 011 into a local network
  • If you're trying to run VMware

All sorts of different services out there use DNS; there's a common mantra...