Packet Sniffing is a colloquial term that refers to the art of network traffic analysis. There are many useful tools that help you collect network traffic activity. Most of them use PCAP (Unix-like systems) to do the actual collection. Packet sniffing tool helps to design and analyze these collected network traffic packets as small amounts of data that are hard to navigate. Following is a handpicked list of Top WiFi Sniffer Apps with their popular features and website links. The list contains both open source (free) and commercial (paid) software.
Best WiFi Packet Sniffing Apps
1) Network Packet Sniffer
SolarWinds Network Packet Sniffer offers network insights for deeper visibility of the network. This WiFi sniffer tool is used for fault detection, performance monitoring, and network availability. It allows you to reduce network downtime and helps to resolve Wi-Fi connection problems like network bandwidth issues.
Features:
This WiFi sniffer helps you retrieve performance metrics for autonomous wireless controllers, access points, and clients. It uses the system messages sent out by routers and switches instead of capturing network packets from the network. It allows cross-stack network data correlation. Provides better network insights for deeper visibility. It offers visibility on critical network firewalls and load balancers. Supported Platforms: Microsoft Windows Server.
Visit Network Packet 30-Days Free Trial
2) ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is a unified network systems monitoring and management solution for efficient and seamless IT Operations Management. This tool is suitable for enterprises, distributed networks, SMBs, etc.
Features:
Dashboards, heat maps, business views, network device grouping, for better network overview. Unified network performance monitoring, server and VM monitoring, switch monitoring, router monitoring, WLC monitoring, hardware monitoring. With the ManageEngine Applications Manager plug-in for OpManager, you can monitor critical performance metrics of your business applications both on premise & cloud.
Visit ManageEngine 30-Days Free Trial
3) Paessler
Paessler PRTG is a WiFi monitoring and analyzer tool that helps you analyze all network devices on your network, including Wi-Fi routers.
Features:
PRTG allows you to easily interpret all the data collected on your Wi-Fi connection networks. Allows you to analyze wireless traffic. Provides Four packet sniffer capture sensors. PRTG wireless network monitor offers a LAN sniffer header sensor that helps you configure the network to promptly notify as soon as Wi-Fi networking disruption occurs. Allows you to set the alarm system for your WiFi network. Analyzes every aspect of your wireless networks. Supported Platforms: Windows & hosted version.
Visit Paessler PRTG » 30-Days Free Trial
4) Acrylic WiFi
Acrylic WiFi is a free wireless network sniffer that allows users to scan and analyze local wireless routers in a compiled table of relevant details. It provides all the important metrics like MAC address, SSID, RSSI, channel, and vendor.
Features:
It helps to analyze and resolve the incidences in real-time on 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac networks. It helps you to capture WiFi traffic on Linux systems. It is compatible with most hardware and does not require any special components to function, which makes it affordable, accessible, and easy to acquire. Easily integrates with the latest versions of Wireshark. Compatible with the most common Wi-Fi USB cards on the market and the latest cards. Supported Platform: Windows.
5) Wireshark
Wireshark is a wireless network sniffer tool that captures packets in real-time and displays them in a human-readable format. It allows the network admin team to read/write network data and capture it in many file formats.
Features:
Captures files compressed with a gzip that can be decompressed on the fly Output can be exported to XML, PostScript, CSV or plain text. Multi-platform Support: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others. Live data can be read from the Ethernet, PPP/HDLC, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, etc. Supported Platform: Windows.
Link: https://www.wireshark.org/
6) Tcpdump
TCPdump offers a command-line packet analyzer and a portable C/C++ library called libpcap to capture the network traffic. It is a good option for the users who wants a simple tool and needs a quick scan.
Features:
It helps you perform functions like displaying and saving captured packets to file Dipslay avialble interface. Supproted Platforms: Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS, etc.
Link: https://www.tcpdump.org/
7) Omnipeek
Omnipeek is a wirelesss network sniffer tool that helps you to decode more than 1,000 protocols for a faster network. It offers network troubleshooting and diagnostics for network issues.
Features:
Intuitive graphic display and visualization Allows you to monitor distributed networks remotely Voice and video monitoring and troubleshooting Helps you to troubleshoot end-users devices remotely Proactively identifies network issues
Link: https://www.liveaction.com/products/omnipeek-network-protocol-analyzer/
8) Aircrack
Aircrack is a wireless password cracking tool that you can use for 802.11a/b/g WEP and WPA cracking. It offers the best WiFi packet sniffing that helps you to recover wireless passwords by capturing packets.
Features:
Improved tracking speed Support for fragmentation attacks Monitoring: Packet capture and data export to text files for further processing by third-party tools Supported Platforms: Windows
Link: https://www.aircrack-ng.org/
9) Capsa
Capsa is a network monitoring software used for network performance troubleshooting, Ethernet monitoring, and analysis. It allows users to learn how to perform network sniffing tool activities, find network issues, and enhance network security for free.
Features:
Provides improved efficiency to evaluate periodical and occasional network issues, etc. This network performance monitoring tool offers network data storage for weeks or months to browse historical network traffic. Decreased time and efforts need to reconstruct network issue scenarios.
Link: https://www.colasoft.com/capsa/
10) Kismet
Kismet is a wireless network detector and intrusion detection system. It works with WiFi networks but can be expanded via plugins to handle other network types as well.
Features:
This WiFi sniffer software allows standard PCAP logging. Offers client/server modular architecture. Plugin architecture to expand core features. Provides multiple capture source support. Distributed remote sniffing via lightweight remote capture. XML output for integration with other tools.
Link: https://www.kismetwireless.net/
11) Riverbed
Riverbed is a real-time network packet analyzer software. It offers packet analysis and reporting of large files. This Wi-Fi analyzer tool offers an intuitive GUI interface and provides a selection of pre-defined analysis views.
Features:
This sniffer software helps you to drag and drop preconfigured analysis views. This packet analyzer helps you merge multiple trace files to pinpoint where problems are happening across multiple segments. It helps you to identify and utilize microbursts that can saturate a gigabit network and cause significant damage.
Link: https://www.riverbed.com/products/npm/packet-analyzer.html
12) Fiddler
Fiddler is a web debugging proxy that helps you record and inspect networks from any browser. It also allows you to debug web traffic from any system. You can use this IP sniffer tool with .NET Standard 2.0 version.
Features:
You can compose your HTTP requests and run them with Fiddler. It offers information for total page weight, HTTP caching, and compression. This tool allows you to debug traffic virtually from any application that supports a proxy. Supported Platforms: Mac or Linux systems.
Link: https://www.telerik.com/fiddler
13) Ntop
Ntop is a network traffic usage monitor and IP sniffer tool that shows network usage in real-time. It offers an interactive mode that shows the network status on the user’s terminal.
Features:
Helps to produce long-term reports for several network metrics, including throughput and L7 application protocols. This wifi packet sniffing tool helps you to analyze IP traffic and sort it according to the source/destination. Allows you to report and assign DHCP IP address usage shorted by protocol type.
Link: https://www.ntop.org/
14) Netresec
Netresec is a WiFi sniffer tool that focuses on the network security field. This software helps you with network forensics and analysis of network traffic.
Features:
This WiFi sniffer tool is built in such a way that it is easy to perform advanced network traffic analysis. Netresec is one of the best WiFi sniffer tools that helps you to generate a keyword CSV file when one or several keywords are detected. Netresec can read a custom keyword list and cleartext dictionary from a file using command line arguments. It offers extraction of metadata from PcapNG files.
Link: https://www.netresec.com/
15) Freenetwork
Freenetwork is a free network sniffing tool. It helps you to monitor and analyze all the data coming through your network adapter. This tool provides you with on-the-fly network traffic capture. It also provides the best packet sniffer inspection functionality.
Features:
This is one of the best WiFi sniffer tools which allows on-the-fly protocol analysis for real-time applications. This best packet sniffer tool helps your network to run smoothly at high data rates and saves system resources. This free network tool supports advanced data filtering and layout customization. It provides good customer support where you can ask questions and get answers from experts.
Link: https://freenetworkanalyzer.com/
FAQ:
Network Packet Sniffer ManageEngine OpManager Paessler Acrylic WiFi Wireshark TCPdump Omnipeek Aircrack Capsa Kismet Riverbed
For example, with a Wi-Fi analyzer app, you can look for other channels on your Wi-Fi sniffer network. This helps you to identify if they are faster than your current system or not.
Knowing the basics helps you to analyze network traffic.You need to know basic networking works. Moreover, knowing about the types of network traffic on a healthy network, like Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), for network management, is key.You should also know what you want from the packet sniffer to collect and have at least a general idea of what is a normal condition and what is not. Copy Conservatively: A Wi-Fi packet sniffers will copy the payload of all packets traveling on the network. It helps you to protect your company and avoid putting sensitive information. Monitor Storage Space: Even if you just capturing packet headers or storing all the packets which can consume a large amount of your disk space. It is best to copy every tenth packet rather than copying every single one. This is known as packet sampling, and it is a practice used to characterize network traffic. Decode the Data: You need to select a packet LAN sniffer which is able to decode this administrative information and extract other valuable insights. Like varying port numbers between two packet travel.
IP address spoofing: It occurs at the network level. Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) spoofing: It always happens at the data link layer. Domain Name System (DNS) spoofing: Helps you turn away Internet traffic from legitimate servers to fake servers. Email spoofing: While IP sniffing has been a cybersecurity threat, the Covid environment has built new opportunities for carrying email spoofing. In email spoofing, a link is given in the email which users click but they do not receive the expected information.
PCAP copies all the packets including the data payload. In contrast, other tools only display and store packet headers. Packet sniffer copies data as it travels across a network and makes it available for viewing. The sniffing device copies all of the data that passes over a network. Mostly, the packets of data that are reaped from the network get copied to a file. However, packet sniffers can collect lots of data, which includes encoded admin team information. You should find an analysis tool that helps you be dereferencing information on the journey of the packets and other pieces of information. Like the relevance of the port numbers that the packets travel between. A straightforward Wi-Fi packet sniffer will copy all the packets traveling on the cisco network. This can be a serious problem if the packet contents are not required by network performance analysis. So, to track the cisco network usage for 24 hours or over a few days, storing every packet will occupy a large amount of disk space. Therefore, it is good to sample and copy every 10th or 20th packet instead of copying over every single one. Allowing the use of full packet capture capabilities may break the confidentiality of data held by the enterprise and data security standards compliance.
