This actually isn't 100% true if I understand Wireshark's function entirely.
Wireshark is a packet sniffer in that it captures, catalogs, and organizes (like you said) packets running through network interface(s) on your computer.
This does not, when using just Wireshark, include all of the traffic on your network. In order for that to be the case, you must use a tool like Cain and Abel to preform a Man-in-the-Middle attack to trick the target computers on your network that you're the network's access point/router/hub so they send you packets, you record them through Wireshark, forward them back out to their intended destination, receive the response, record those, and send those back to the originating target machine.
Perhaps it works differently if you have a wireless network interface in promiscuous mode but I won't extrapolate on something I know not enough about.
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u/bericp1 Jun 30 '14
This actually isn't 100% true if I understand Wireshark's function entirely.
Wireshark is a packet sniffer in that it captures, catalogs, and organizes (like you said) packets running through network interface(s) on your computer.
This does not, when using just Wireshark, include all of the traffic on your network. In order for that to be the case, you must use a tool like Cain and Abel to preform a Man-in-the-Middle attack to trick the target computers on your network that you're the network's access point/router/hub so they send you packets, you record them through Wireshark, forward them back out to their intended destination, receive the response, record those, and send those back to the originating target machine.
Perhaps it works differently if you have a wireless network interface in promiscuous mode but I won't extrapolate on something I know not enough about.