History of Wireshark
Wireshark was started with the intention of developing a tool for closely analyzing network packets. It was started by Gerald Combez in 1997. Its initial name was Ethereal. It was initially released in July 1998 as version 0.2.0. Due to the support it got from the developer community, it grew rapidly and was released as version 1.0 in 2008, almost two years after it was renamed to Wireshark.
Introduction to Wireshark
Wireshark is a software tool used to monitor the network traffic through a network interface. It is the most widely used network monitoring tool today. Wireshark is loved equally by system administrators, network engineers, network enthusiasts, network security professionals and black hat hackers.
The extent of its popularity is such, that experience with Wireshark is considered as a valuable/essential trait in a computer networking-related professional.
There are many reasons why Wireshark is so popular :
- It has a great GUI as well as a conventional CLI(T Shark).
- It offers network monitoring on almost all types of network standards (ethernet, wlan, Bluetooth etc)
- It is open-source with a large community of backers and developers.
- All the necessary components for monitoring, analyzing and documenting the network traffic are present. It is free to use.