Charit Mishra - Mastering Wireshark

Mastering Wireshark

Table of Contents

Mastering Wireshark

Mastering Wireshark

Copyright 2016 Packt Publishing

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First published: March 2016

Production reference: 1210316

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78398-952-2

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Credits

Author

Charit Mishra

Reviewer

Anish Nath

Commissioning Editor

Kunal Parikh

Acquisition Editor

Kevin Colaco

Content Development Editor

Onkar Wani

Technical Editor

Pranjali Mistry

Copy Editor

Neha Vyas

Project Coordinator

Bijal Patel

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Rekha Nair

Production Coordinator

Manu Joseph

Cover Work

Manu Joseph

About the Author

Charit Mishra works as a consultant and pentester at Protiviti, one of the top global consulting firms. He enjoys his job, which involves helping clients identify security vulnerabilities, more than anything. With real hands-on experience in security, he has obtained leading industry certifications such as OSCP, CEH, CompTIA Security+, and CCNA R&S. He also holds a master's degree in computer science. He has delivered professional talks at various institutions and private organizations on information security and penetration testing. You can reach him at LinkedIn at https://ae.linkedin.com/in/charitmishra, and on Twitter at @charit0819 .

First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved parents and my lovely sister, Ayushi, for their full support, expert guidance, understanding, and encouragement throughout my journey of making this possible. Without their incredible wisdom and counsel, this would have been an overwhelming pursuit.

I would like to also thank my good friend and mentor Mr. Piyush Verma for believing in me and guiding me whenever I needed direction. I am also thankful to all my friends and well wishers, especially Mr. Siddarth Pandey, Mr. Arham Husain, Mr. Bharath Methari, Mr. Dileep Mishra, and a great friend from Pakistan, Mr. Haider Ali Chughtai, who all helped me in every possible aspects and always motivated me to achieve the best. My apologies if I've missed anyone out.

Last but not least, I am grateful to the amazing team at Packt Publishing for their constant and incredible support for making this happen, and thanks to all the reviewers who helped bring this book into the best shape possible.

As the great influential Swami Vivekananda said, "In a day, when you don't come across any problems, you can be sure that you are traveling on the wrong path".

About the Reviewer

Anish Nath has a YouTube channel that you can visit at https://goo.gl/sbJkuX, where he loves to post videos on security, hacking, and other cloud-related technologies.

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Preface

Almost every device around you is connected to some other device over a network with the motive of sharing information or supporting other devices. With this small picture in your mind, what do you think is the most critical part of a network? Obviously, the channel isn't.

This book is written from a standpoint of using Wireshark to understand and troubleshoot commonly seen network anomalies. It can be the start of your journey into the world of networks/traffic/packet analysis. You can be the savior of your generation or the superhero of your team who helps people with connectivity issues, network administration, computer forensics, and so on. If your routine job requires dealing with computer networks, then this book can give you a strong head start. As the tagline says "From 0 to 1337",that is we will start from the basics gradually moving on to the advanced concepts too.

I have tried to cover the most common scenarios that you could come across while troubleshooting, along with hands-on practical cases that can make you understand the concepts better. By mastering packet analysis, you will learn how to troubleshoot all the way down to the bare wires. This will teach you to make sense of the data flowing around. You will find very interesting sections, such as troubleshooting slow networks, analyzing packets over Wi-Fi, malware analysis, and not to forget, the latest features introduced in Wireshark 2.0 in this book. Happy troubleshooting!

What this book covers

, Welcome to the World of Packet Analysis with Wireshark , provides you an introduction to the basics of the TCP/IP model and familiarizes you with the GUI of Wireshark along with a sample packet capture. Here, you will learn how to set up network sniffers for analysis purpose.

, Filtering Our Way in Wireshark , talks about different filtering options available in Wireshark, namely capture and display filters, and how to create and use different profiles. Make yourself comfortable with the rich interface of Wireshark and start capturing what you exactly want to.

, Mastering the Advanced Features in Wireshark , helps you look under the hood of the statistics menu in Wireshark and work with the different command-line utilities that come prepackaged with Wireshark. You will also learn how to prepare graphs, charts, packet flow diagrams, and most important of all, how to become a command-line fu master.

, Inspecting Application Layer Protocols , helps you understand and analyze the normal and unusual behavior of application-layer protocols. Here, we will briefly discuss the techniques you can use to understand the cause. We all are aware of the basics, but have you ever thought how common application-layer protocol traffic can go crazy? In this chapter, you will learn how to deal with them.

, Analyzing Transport Layer Protocols , shows how TCP and UDP protocols work, how they communicate, what problems they face, and how Wireshark can be used to analyze them. Make yourself a transport-layer doctor who can easily figure out common anomalies and prove themselves worthy.