Archive for the ‘Packet Capture’ category

  1. Wireshark File Storage

    Sometimes it is important to know how Wireshark captures packets, and when it is writing them to disk. One of the common questions is “how can I avoid writing packets to disk, and just capture them in memory?”.
  2. Sharkfest 2014 Recap

    Sharkfest 2014 is over, and once again it was an amazing conference. It was probably the best of them for me, for a number of reasons:
  3. The drawbacks of local packet captures

    Probably the most common way of capturing network data is not a decision between SPAN or TAP – it is Wireshark simply being installed on one of the computers that need to be analyzed. While this an easy way to capture network packets it is also an easy way to get “wrong” results, because there […]
  4. TCP Server slamming the door

    After doing a lot of analysis sessions on TCP connections there are some patterns that you see again in a trace every once in a while. And often it comes in handy to remember what the situation was and what the circumstances were that led to the trace showing what it did.
  5. IPv6 DHCP flood

    A few days ago I took a capture for some reason and saw something unexpected that had nothing to do with what I wanted to check: there were tons and tons of DHCPv6 packets trying to renew an IPv6 address in a never ending stream of packets, and really fast, too.
  6. A creative way of refusing connections

    A few days ago, Olli, one of our team members, sent me a funny trace that he’d taken while configuring the security settings on a Netoptics Bypass kit. This device has an SNMP and HTTP management service, and when he disabled the HTTP service he verified if the setting was accepted (like you should). Usually, […]
  7. Tweaking Wireshark Columns and Decodes

    It’s a funny thing about using Wireshark – I think I am pretty good at using it in an efficient way, but there are always some new tricks that I learn every once in a while. The Multi IP layer problem Maybe you have seen this in a trace before: some packets contain more than […]
  8. It’s been a while…

    …before I found some time to post something on this blog. Mostly because of the summer break, but also because I was attending DefCon 2013 in Las Vegas, after a break of 3 years. I used to be at DefCon every year while it was held at the Riviera, working for the hotel as a […]
  9. Happy Birthday, Wireshark!

    15 years ago, Wireshark was “born”, so happy birthday! Take a look at the official Wireshark Blog for Gerald’s post. And watch Gerald’s keynote he did at Sharkfest 2013. And, of course, the funny video about how it was all Karen’s idea – which Gerald, at the time it was shown at Sharkfest, had no […]
  10. PCAP and PCAPng sanitization tool for network analysts

    Trace file anonymization, trace file sanitization… it seems like I can’t decide whether to call it “Sanitization” or “Anonymization” – even in my code base it is sometimes called the first, sometimes the latter. Of course there is a small difference between the two – one is removing sensitive data by cutting it away, while […]