A drop-down menu will appear when you click on capture in the main menu, click on Start. To begin capturing data, click on any one network interface which has some live transmission occurring. Various protocols such as HTTP, Telnet, IMAP, FTP, SMTP among others are vulnerable to sniffing.

Network sniffing can be used to capture sensitive data like login credentials or to capture files sent over a network. The main menu at the top displays the various options that Wireshark is equipped with, we’ll look at how to use the Capture, Analyze and Statistics choices. The small graph to the right of each represents the flow of live traffic on the interface. In this case, we have Local Area Connection, Ethernet and Wi-fi. On launching the application, we get a welcome screen that has the various network interfaces available for your device listed. It comes pre-installed in the Kali Linux OS. For Linux or other UNIX-like systems, Wireshark is probably present in the package repositories. You can download it for both Windows and MacOS from the official Wireshark website.

Download and InstallĪs mentioned above, it is open-source software, so it is available for download free of cost. It has a wide array of features that are mainly used to troubleshoot network problems and for the analysis and testing of software. Wireshark is one of the best tools for intercepting packets going across a target network, as well as read the contents of each packet in a human-readable format which can be filtered and colour-coded to meet specific requirements. It can run on Windows, Linux and, Mac, is user-friendly and easy to capture and view data because of the attractive graphical user interface.

One of the reasons is its open-source availability and cross-platform compatibility. Wireshark is the most popular packet sniffer currently. It is both an interactive packet sniffing tool and an analysis tool. Wireshark is one of the most robust and powerful open-source packet sniffers.

Wireshark packet sniffer