Wireshark Revealed: Essential Skills for IT Professionals

Master Wireshark and discover how to analyze network packets and protocols effectively, along with engaging recipes to troubleshoot network problems

About This Book

• Gain valuable insights into the network and application protocols, and the key fields in each protocol
• Use Wireshark's powerful statistical tools to analyze your network and leverage its expert system to pinpoint network problems
• Master Wireshark and train it as your network sniffer

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at IT professionals who want to develop or enhance their packet analysis skills. A basic familiarity with common network and application services terms and technologies is assumed.

What You Will Learn

• Discover how packet analysts view networks and the role of protocols at the packet level
• Capture and isolate all the right packets to perform a thorough analysis using Wireshark's extensive capture and display filtering capabilities
• Decrypt encrypted wireless traffic
• Use Wireshark as a diagnostic tool and also for network security analysis to keep track of malware
• Find and resolve problems due to bandwidth, throughput, and packet loss
• Identify and locate faults in communication applications including HTTP, FTP, mail, and various other applications – Microsoft OS problems, databases, voice, and video over IP
• Identify and locate faults in detecting security failures and security breaches in the network

In Detail

This Learning Path starts off installing Wireshark, before gradually taking you through your first packet capture, identifying and filtering out just the packets of interest, and saving them to a new file for later analysis. You will then discover different ways to create and use capture and display filters. By halfway through the book, you'll be mastering Wireshark features, analyzing different layers of the network protocol, and looking for any anomalies.We then start Ethernet and LAN switching, through IP, and then move on to TCP/UDP with a focus on TCP performance problems. It also focuses on WLAN security. Then, we go through application behavior issues including HTTP, mail, DNS, and other common protocols. This book finishes with a look at network forensics and how to locate security problems that might harm the network.This course provides you with highly practical content explaining Metasploit from the following books:

• Wireshark Essentials
• Network Analysis Using Wireshark Cookbook
• Mastering Wireshark

Style and approach

This step-by-step guide follows a practical approach, starting from the basic to the advanced aspects. Through a series of real-world examples, this learning path will focus on making it easy for you to become an expert at using Wireshark.