Introducing Wireshark

Wireshark is one of the best cybersecurity tools used to monitor and secure networks.

This chapter aims to give you an overview of the tool and the main things that you can achieve with it. However, if you want to learn more about Wireshark, look at the book Learn Wireshark by Lisa Bock, also from Packt, which has more than 400 pages full of knowledge that will help you to become an expert with this tool.

The main characteristic of Wireshark is the ability to gather all network traffic passing through a given network adapter and decode the captured bits into a human-readable format. This is achieved by using decoders or dissectors that are constantly updated by the community.

Wireshark can be installed on any OS, but as you may know, it comes preinstalled on Kali Linux, so for this example we are going to use the version on Kali, which in our case is 3.2.7.

The very first step to start capturing our first packets will be to select the network card...