Wireshark Packet Export Mastery

Introduction

In this lab, you will learn how to export packets from Wireshark, a powerful network protocol analyzer. Being able to export packets is essential for further analysis, sharing, and archiving network traffic data. This lab will guide you through the process of capturing network traffic, filtering packets, and exporting them in various formats.

Skills Graph

Capturing Network Traffic

In this step, you will learn how to capture network traffic using Wireshark.

1. Open Wireshark on your Linux machine by running the following command in the terminal:

wireshark

2. Once Wireshark is open, select the network interface you want to capture traffic from. You can choose the eth1 from the Interface list in the toolbar.
3. Click the Start button (the blue shark fin icon) to start capturing packets.
4. Once the capture is running, open another terminal and visit a website by entering the following command.

curl www.google.com

5. After a few seconds, stop the capture by clicking the Stop button (the red square icon).
6. Save the captured packets to a file by clicking on File > Save As and name the file capture.pcapng in /home/labex/project directory.

You should now see the captured network packets in the Wireshark window.

Filtering Packets

In this step, you will learn how to filter packets in Wireshark to focus on specific traffic.

1. In the Wireshark window, locate the filter box at the top of the packet list.
2. To filter for HTTP traffic, enter http in the filter box and press Enter.

3. The packet list will now only display packets related to HTTP traffic.
4. To further filter the HTTP traffic, you can use display filters. For example, to filter for HTTP GET requests, enter http.request.method == GET in the filter box and press Enter.

Exporting Packets

In this step, you will learn how to export packets from Wireshark in various formats.

1. Continue from the previous step, clear the filter box back to the initial data.

2. In the Wireshark window, select the packets you want to export by clicking and dragging to select multiple packets or pressing Ctrl+A to select all packets.
3. Go to the File menu and select Export Specified Packets....
4. In the export dialog, choose the desired export format. The pcap format is selected here.
5. Name the file exported.pcap and click Save to export the selected packet to the /home/labex/project directory.

6. Go to the File menu and select Export Packet Dissections..., and then click the As CSV... button.
7. Name the file exported.csv and click Save to export the selected packet to the /home/labex/project directory.

Summary

In this lab, you learned how to capture network traffic using Wireshark, filter packets based on specific criteria, and export packets in various formats for further analysis or sharing. Exporting packets is a crucial skill in cybersecurity, as it allows you to share network traffic data with others, archive it for future reference, or perform additional analysis using other tools. By completing this lab, you have gained hands-on experience with one of the most essential features of Wireshark, an invaluable tool for network analysis and cybersecurity professionals.