 What we now know as Wireshark came from a project that began in 1998. It is a free and open source packet analyzer that is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, protocol development, and education. If you would like to know more about the wide array of features offered by Wireshark, visit their website at Wireshark.org. There, you can also find thorough documentation in the software's user guide. The user guide also gives more information about the different menu and toolbar items. As such, we're not going to go into that in this video. Instead, we're going to look at the process of starting a capture and seeing an overview of the results as a very basic introduction. In the upper left hand corner of the screen, there's an icon called list the available capture interfaces, when you click that icon, a new screen pops up that lists all the available network interfaces. You can select one or all of these to monitor and then click the start button. Once you click start, you'll see traffic starting to come in on the original screen. We'll let that run for a few seconds to capture some packets, then we'll stop the capture by clicking the stop the running live capture button, four over from the left at the top. Now that we've stopped the capture, we can examine the packets. Let's examine how the wire shark screen looks now. There are three new areas that contain information. The top most area is a high level view of the network and packets traveling through the network. When you click on one of these items, then you'll see the information relating to that packet divided by protocol layers in the area in the middle of the window. Beneath that, you have that information in hexadecimal. This is also called the raw packet. Now, we're going to drill down a little deeper into a particular packet. For this demonstration, we're going to use a bit of TCP traffic. Let's follow the stream of this first, TCP packet. Select to highlight the packet and right click. From the right click menu select follow TCP stream. A new window will pop up with the contents of the entire stream of this packet. At the bottom of the screen, select the radio button labeled ASCII. In our example here, we have an IRC chat log. You can see the entirety of this user's IRC chat, including private messages, from decoding the packet stream. Wire shark is a powerful tool that can be used for many things. This is just a small sample of what can be done. To download wire shark and try some things for yourself, visit wireshark.org.