Wireshark is an open-source network packet analyzer. It is the world’s leading network packet analyzer, and an essential tool for security professionals or systems administrators, and also for teaching purposes. Network traffic is analyzed in real-time and is one of the best tools for troubleshooting issues on your network.
The Wireshark software can be downloaded for free from the official website. On the download page, the latest stable release versions are available for windows and macOS. As of the time of writing this article, the latest stable release version of Wireshark is 3.4.6.
Go to the official website of Wireshark and Click on download.
Select the appropriate installer 32 or 64 bit for your operating system. For this tutorial, I am using a Windows 64bit installer.
After downloading the installer of your choice, go to the download folder and double-click the installer.
If you see a User Account Control dialog box, “Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device?” select yes to allow the program to make changes to this computer.
Clicking yes brings you to the next interface for you to start the setup. Select Next to start the Setup Wizard.
You need to agree to the Wireshark license agreement. It’s open-source so you don’t have to pay for it. But you have to agree to the license if you want to use it. Click on Noted.
Select next to accept the default components.
Select the shortcuts you would like to have created. Leave the file extensions selected. Click next to continue.
Click next, unless you want to change the default installation directory.
Wireshark requires either Npcap or WinPcap to capture live network data. Click on next.
If you want to capture USB traffic, you will check the “install USBPcap”, otherwise click on install to continue the installation process.
As you can see, Wireshark is now been install on my computer, there are a whole bunch of files that need to be installed.
Along the line, the Npcap license agreement comes up which you have to agree to after reading by clicking “I Agree” to continue the installation process.
Then click install by staying with the default settings.
Once the Npcap installation is complete click on next to continue the installation of Wireshark.
Once the installation is complete, click next, click finish.
You can now run the application.