Wireshark is the most widely used network capture and protocol analyzer on the market. It is used by IT and Network administrators to troubleshoot network connectivity issues and by Network Security analysts to dissect network attacks. This free and open source application is so widely used in the industry because it works. It is cross platform, meaning that it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD.

Wireshark is a great tool for pentester and has a rich feature set which includes the following:

• Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time

• Live capture and offline analysis

• Standard three-pane packet browser

• Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others

• Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility

• The most powerful display filters in the industry

• Rich VoIP analysis

• Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer® (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer® Pro, and NetXray®, Network Instruments Observer, NetScreen snoop, Novell LANalyzer, RADCOM WAN/LAN Analyzer, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, Tektronix K12xx, Visual Networks Visual UpTime, WildPackets EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, and many others

• Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly

• Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)

• Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2

• Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis

• Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text

This course is an introduction to the application and goes over the basics to get you started capturing and analyzing network traffic. It will build your base by explaining the theory behind how networks work and then get you into real-world applications of the software.