Wireshark is definitely one of the most important tools any network/security engineer can have. Both types of engineer live and die by Wireshark, as every issue tends to either be the network's fault or a firewall-related issue until proven otherwise, which is the job of Wireshark. Wireshark is a graphical-based multi-platform packet analyzer, and serves many important uses in the penetration testing family of tools. Wireshark comes preinstalled in Kali Linux, and is included in the Top 10 tools category in the Kali Linux application drop-down menu.

Wireshark allows users to drill down to great depths at the packet level to see what traffic is traversing the interface we are sensing from. This allows us to see at great detail everything we could possibly want to see, from the Layer 2 Frame level all the way up to the Layer 7 protocol information, to include headers and footers, integrity checks, and the payloads themselves. Even better, Wireshark lays them all out for us!

As we...