what we now know as Wireshark came from
a project that began in 1998 it is a
free and open source packet analyzer
that is used for network troubleshooting
analysis protocol development and
education if you would like to know more
about the wide array of features offered
by Wireshark visit their website at
Wireshark org there you can also find
thorough documentation in the software's
user guide the user guide also gives
more information about the different
menu and toolbar items as such we're not
going to go into that in this video
instead we're going to look at the
process of starting a capture and seeing
an overview of the results as a very
basic introduction in the upper left
hand corner of the screen there's an
icon called list the available capture
interfaces when you click that icon a
new screen pops up that lists all the
available network interfaces you can
select one or all of these to monitor
and then click the start button once you
click start you'll see traffic starting
to come in on the original screen will
let that run for a few seconds to
capture some packets then we'll stop the
capture by clicking the stop the running
live capture button or over from the
left at the top now that we've stopped
the capture we can examine the packets
let's examine how the Wireshark screen
looks now there are three new areas that
contain information the topmost area is
a high-level view of the network and
packets traveling through the network
when you click on one of these items
then you'll see the information relating
to that packet / protocol layers in the
area in the middle of the window beneath
that you have that information in
hexadecimal this is also called the raw
packet now we're going to drill down a
little deeper into a particular packet
for this demonstration we're going to
use a bit of TCP traffic let's follow
the stream of this first TCP packet
select to highlight the packet and
right-click from the right-click menu
select follow TCP stream a new window
will pop up with the contents of the
entire stream of this packet at the
bottom of the screen select the radio
button labeled sq in our example here we
have an IRC chat log you can see the
entirety of this user's IRC chat
including private messages from decoding
the packet stream Wireshark is a
powerful tool that can be used for many
things this is just a small sample of
what can be done to download Wireshark
and try some things for yourself visit
Wireshark Gordon
you