Advanced Wireshark – going beyond simple captures

I assume you’ve had some experience with Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) by now. Even if you’re new to pen testing, it’s hard to avoid Wireshark in lab environments. If you aren’t familiar with this fantastic packet analyzer, you’ll no doubt be familiar with packet analyzers in general. A sniffer is a great challenge for anyone learning how to code.

So, I won’t be covering the basics of Wireshark. We are all familiar with packet analyzers as a concept; we know about Wireshark’s color-coded protocol analysis and so on. We’re going to take Wireshark beyond theory and ordinary capture, and apply it to some practical examples. We’ll look at passive wireless analysis with Wireshark, and we’ll learn how to use Wireshark as our sidekick when we use our attack tools.

Passive wireless analysis

So far, we’ve been studying layer 2 and above. The...