What does Wireshark do?
* Capture and analyze network traffic in your company's, customer's or wi-fi network.
* Read live data from 802.11 wireless LAN, Ethernet, Token-Ring, FDDI, serial (PPP and SLIP), ATM connections.
* Detect an intrusion attempt although not designed to be an intrusion detection system.
Snort will probably works better.
What is Wireshark?
Wireshark used to be known as Ethereal. Wireshark is the world's most popular network protocol analyzer or packet sniffer. Network professionals, security experts, developers, and educators around the world use it regularly. It is freely available as open source.
Features
Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:
* Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time
* Live capture and offline analysis
* Standard three-pane packet browser
* Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
* Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
* The most powerful display filters in the industry
* Rich VoIP analysis
* Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer Pro, and NetXray, Network Instruments Observer, NetScreen snoop, Novell LANalyzer, RADCOM WAN/LAN Analyzer, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, Tektronix K12xx, Visual Networks Visual UpTime, WildPackets EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, and many others
* Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
* Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)
* Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
* Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
* Output can be exported to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text
Each Windows package comes with the latest stable release of
WinPcap, which is required for live packet capture.
