Practical Packet Analysis ― Using Wireshark to Solve Real-world Network Problems

Wireshark is the world's most popular network sniffer that makes capturing packets easy, but it won't be much help if you don't have a solid foundation in packet analysis.

Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Edition will show you how to make sense of your PCAP data and let you start troubleshooting the problems on your network. This third edition is updated for Wireshark 2.0.5 and IPV6, making it the definitive guide to packet analysis and a must for any network technician, administrator, or engineer. This updated version includes two new chapters that will teach you how to use the powerful command-line packet analyzers tcpdump and TShark as well as how to read and reference packet values using a packet map.

Practical Packet Analysis will introduce you to the basics of packet analysis, starting with how networks work and how packets travel along the wire. Then you'll move onto navigating packets and using Wireshark to capture and analyze packets. The book then covers common lower-layer and upper-layer protocols and provides you with real-world scenarios like Internet connectivity issues, how to capture social media traffic, and fighting a slow network.

You'll learn how to:

• Monitor your network in real-time and tap live network communications
• Recognize common network protocols including TCP, IPv4 and IPv6, SMTP, and ARP
• Build customized capture and display filters to quickly navigate through large numbers of packets
• Troubleshoot and resolve common network problems like loss of connectivity, DNS issues, and sluggish speeds with packet analysis
• Understand how modern exploits and malware behave at the packet level
• Carve out data in a packet to retrieve the actual files sent across the network
• 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

Whether you're a budding network analyst in need of a headfirst dive into packet analysis or an experienced administrator searching for new tricks, look no further than the third edition of Practical Packet Analysis.

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