Practical Packet Analysis

It’s easy to capture packets with Wireshark, the world’s most popular network sniffer, whether off the wire or from the air. But how do you use those packets to understand what’s happening on your network?

Updated to cover Wireshark 2.x, the third edition of Practical Packet Analysis will teach you to make sense of your packet captures so that you can better troubleshoot network problems. You’ll find added coverage of IPv6 and SMTP, a new chapter on the powerful command line packet analyzers tcpdump and TShark, and an appendix on how to read and reference packet values using a packet map.

Practical Packet Analysis will show you how to:

–Monitor your network in real time and tap live network communications

–Build customized capture and display filters

–Use packet analysis to troubleshoot and resolve common network problems, like loss of connectivity, DNS issues, and slow speeds

–Explore modern exploits and malware at the packet level

–Extract files sent across a network from packet captures

–Graph traffic patterns to visualize the data flowing across your network

–Use advanced Wireshark features to understand confusing captures

–Build statistics and reports to help you better explain technical network information to non-techies

No matter what your level of experience is, Practical Packet Analysis will show you how to use Wireshark to make sense of any network and get things done.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Packet Analysis and Network Basics

Chapter 2: Tapping into the Wire

Chapter 3: Introduction to Wireshark

Chapter 4: Working with Captured Packets

Chapter 5: Advanced Wireshark Features

Chapter 6: Packet Analysis on the Command Line

Chapter 7: Network Layer Protocols

Chapter 8: Transport Layer Protocols

Chapter 9: Common Upper-Layer Protocols

Chapter 10: Basic Real-World Scenarios

Chapter 11: Fighting a Slow Network

Chapter 12: Packet Analysis for Security

Chapter 13: Wireless Packet Analysis

Appendix A: Further Reading

Appendix B: Navigating Packets

About the Author

Chris Sanders is a computer security consultant, researcher, and educator. He is the author of Applied Network Security Monitoring and blogs regularly at ChrisSanders.org. Chris uses packet analysis daily to catch bad guys and find evil.