Category Archives: Packet Capture

Netzwerkmitschnitte mit tshark analysieren

Haben Sie mal Netzwerkmitschnitte untersucht, ohne zu wissen, was genau Sie suchen? Mit Wireshark wird das leicht zu einer Odyssee: Das Analysewerkzeug filtert zwar fabelhaft, reagiert bei großen Datenmengen aber schnell zäh.

Was bei solchen Problemstellungen hilft ist: tshark! Ein Tool, mit welchem Sie auch große Packet Captures einfach anhand gängiger Kriterien durchforsten können.

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Palo Packet Capture: Choosing the Right Filter

Palo Alto firewalls have a nice packet capture feature. It enables you to capture packets as they traverse the firewall. While you might be familiar with the four stages that the Palo can capture (firewall, drop, transmit, receive), it’s sometimes hard to set the correct filter – especially when it comes to NAT scenarios. (At least it was hard for me…)

I am using the packet capture feature very often for scenarios in which the IP connections are in fact working (hence no problems at the tx/rx level nor on the security policy/profile) but where I want to verify certain details of the connection itself. I’m simply using the Palo as a capturing device here, similar to a SPAN port on a switch. (Yes, I’m aware of all disadvantages of not using a real TAP and a real capture device.) In the end, I want a single pcap which shows all relevant packets for a client-server connection, even if NAT is in place. Wireshark should be able to correlate the incoming/outgoing packets into a single TCP stream. Furthermore, I definitely want to use a filter to limit the amount of captured packets. This is how I’m doing it:

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Intro to NetworkMiner

This is a guest blogpost by Erik Hjelmvik, an expert in network forensics and network security monitoring at NETRESEC.


Wireshark is the default goto tool for analyzing captured network traffic for most network engineers. But there are a few other free and open source alternatives that are sometimes overlooked, one of which is NetworkMiner (disclaimer: I’m the creator of NetworkMiner).

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My Network Gadgets

This post is not about software but hardware tools for network admins. Which network gadgets am I using during my daily business? At least three, namely the Airconsole, the Pockethernet and the ProfiShark, which help me in connecting to serial ports, testing basic network connectivity, and capturing packets in a high professional way. Come in and have a look at how I’m working.

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My Network Companion: The ProfiShark

Since a couple of months, I am carrying a ProfiShark 1G always with me. It’s a small network aggregation TAP that fits into my bag (unlike almost any other TAPs or switches with SPAN functionalities). It runs solely via USB 3.0, hence no additional power supply nor network port on my laptop is required to get it running.

In this post, I’ll give some hints on how to use the ProfiShark 1G with Windows (read: some initial problems I had and how to solve them) as well as some use cases out of my daily work with it.

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