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Introduction WireShark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, and an essential tool for any system administrator or cybersecurity professional. This tool is also free and cross-platform. WireShark: The World’s Foremost Network Protocol Analyzer It’s free, open source, cross-platform and widely-used network protocol analyzer that supports various protocols. WireShark can read and process capture files from a number of different products, including other sniffers, routers, and network utilities. It uses Qt (graphical user interface library), a very popular Promiscuous Capture Library (libpcap), a packet capture and filtering library. It also comes with TShark (a line-oriented sniffer), a terminal-based (non-GUI) version. You can use WireShark to troubleshoot network problems, examine security problems, verify network applications, debug protocol implementations, and also to learn network protocol internals. Wireshark uses a library called pcap for capturing the network packets. History: Wireshark has been around since 1998, when it was invented by Gerald Combs and called Ethereal. In May 2006, Combs change the name to Wireshark, since he didn’t own the Ethereal trademark. Over the years it has won several industry awards and received a lot of community support. WireShark is the most known and the most used network analyzer today. Features: Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols 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. 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. You can apply coloring rules to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis. Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text. [hide][Hidden Content]]