3 Free Packet Sniffing Tools for Windows
3 Free Packet Sniffing Tools for Windows, Do you know what packet sniffing is? Most of us have probably heard this term either from a crazy hack-fiction movie or some reports of malicious network attacks. Well, judging from the name, it’s natural to associate packet sniffing with something dangerous, but it’s not appropriate if you understand it deeply. A sniffing tool or packet sniffer is a common accessory for network experts, and security advisers to analyze networks and diagnose network-related problems or malicious breaches in the network. Below are the 3 best free sniffing tools or packet sniffers for Windows PCs.
While some malicious hackers use packet sniffers to analyze other people’s traffic and collect sensitive information like passwords from your network bridge. In this article, I won’t cover how to attack your neighbors with this packet sniffing tool but will give you some basic intro to how this tool works and some free packet sniffing tools for Windows PC. If you want to see the Wi-Fi passwords of connected networks in Windows 10, read our tutorial.
How Do Sniffing Tools Work?
A packet sniffer can view and analyze various information that is being transmitted through the network and connected nodes. A packet sniffer can be software or hardware depending on the network infrastructure and can analyze sensitive information such as usernames & passwords. They scan incoming and outgoing traffic for all information sent over the network. As data passes through the system, it captures and stores it in memory for later analysis.
The analyzed data is then converted to a human-readable format so that network experts can analyze errors in their network. In layman’s terms, the packet analyzer is powerful enough to analyze all computers connected to the network and retrieve information such as email contacts, messages, download history, browsing history and all audio/video activity on the network. There are many types of packet sniffing tools like ARP sniffing, IP sniffing, MAC sniffing, etc.
So, technically, you can see and monitor everything that is happening on your network. It’s pretty good to see who on your network is consuming more network traffic and what websites they visit. Let’s take a look at some free packet sniffing tools for Windows PCs that are powerful enough for home networks.
The packet sniffing tools listed below are free to use but come with a warning tag not to use them for malicious purposes.
1. WireShark Package Controller
Wireshark is the most popular free packet sniffing tool for Windows and comes as freeware and premium software with an annual subscription. This tool is quite popular because of its accuracy and flexibility and will give you the ability to see what is happening in your tissues at the microscopic level.
Here are some of its popular features.
- In-depth inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time, thanks to a large developer community.
- Live retrieval and offline analysis.
- Standard three-panel package browser.
- Multi-platform support. Apart from Windows, this tool can run on other operating systems such as Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many other platforms.
- Captured network data can be accessed via the GUI, or via the TTY mode TShark utility.
- Rich VoIP analysis.
- Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2.
- Coloring rules can be applied to packing lists for quick intuitive analysis.
- Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text.
You can download this amazing tool from the official website – wireshark.org
