Wireshark for Security Professionals

Chapter 2Setting Up the Lab

The first chapter was all book learning. This chapter is different—you start to get your hands dirty. You want to start analyzing actual network traffic. Of course, to get the required network traffic, you need multiple systems. You could install Wireshark on a local system and capture just any traffic, but this chapter prepares something far better. You create a lab on which you can apply Wireshark to many interesting protocols and scenarios. All this setup will benefit you, not just for the rest of the book, but also for many captures to follow.

You're familiar with Wireshark's layout, and you understand how easily filters sift through a million packets to present just what you want. So we need to create an environment meant for experiments and learning. The environment you set up in this chapter takes care of your needs in a few different forms. Thankfully, you don't need to buy or put together several systems to do so. (Or maybe just your spouse thanks us.)

Because this book is focused on information security, we also spend time with the Metasploit framework and Kali Linux. The Kali Linux distribution is a suite of tools, including Metasploit, that every information security professional should be aware of, if not already experienced with. In this chapter, we introduce Kali Linux, less for its tools and more as the lab platform.

These tools are open source and should be a part of any security professional's toolkit. The number of tools included ...