What Is Wireshark? How to Download Wireshark/Install for Windows?
What is Wireshark? Is Wireshark safe? How to download Wireshark and install this packet analyzer? To know some details of this tool, refer to this post from MiniTool that focuses on Wireshark and Wireshark download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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Overview of Wireshark
What Is Wireshark? In general, it is a free and open-source packet sniffer and analysis tool that allows network and security administrators to conduct a deep analysis of the traffic passing through the network. To be specific, it can capture network traffic from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, frame relay, etc., and store data for offline analysis.
What is Wireshark used for? Wireshark is used for many purposes, including network performance issues troubleshooting, traffic optimization, sniffing out security issues, and more. Government agencies, small businesses, corporations, non-profits, and educational institutions always use Wireshark to fix network issues.
Besides, it can be used as a learning tool. Additionally, Wireshark can help QA engineers to verify apps and Developers to debug protocol implementations.
While Wireshark isn’t omnipotent and it cannot help a person who doesn’t understand network protocols, get traffic from all of the other systems on the network and notify you of alerts.
Wireshark offers decryption support for many protocols like WPA/WPA2, WEP, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, Kerberos, IPsec, and ISAKMP. Besides, most capture file formats are supported including ap), Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Pcap NG, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer, etc.
Wireshark can be available on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others Unix-like operating systems. To use this network protocol analyzer, download Wireshark for Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. and install it.
Related article: What Is Microsoft Network Monitor? How to Use It on Your Windows?
Wireshark Download for Windows, macOS, Linux, etc.
System Requirements
It is totally safe to install & use Wireshark. Before downloading, firstly go to learn about the system requirements of Wireshark. For Windows, Wireshark requires:
- Any Windows versions that are still in support lifetime
- The Universal C Runtime (included with Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019)
- Any modern 64-bit AMD64/64 or 32-bit processor
- More than 500MB of RAM and disk space
- 1280 × 1024 or higher resolution
For macOS, Wireshark supports macOS 10.14 and later. Starting with Wireshark version 4.0, Apple Silicon hardware is supported. For UNIX and UNIX-like platforms like Linux and most BSD variants, the system specifications are similar to the ones listed for Windows.
Wireshark Download Free
Then follow the guide to get the download file of this tool.
- Go to visit the page https://www.wireshark.org/download.html via a browser.
- You can see the latest version. To download Wireshark for Windows 11/10/8/7 64-bit, click Windows Installer (64-bit) to get an .exe file. To download Wireshark for macOS, click macOS Arm 64-bit .dmg or macOS Intel 64-bit .dmg based on your processor to get a .dmg file.
Wireshark also offers you links to download old versions. Just expand Old Stable Releases, click the download link to get the installation file for Windows (32/64-bit) & macOS based on your operating system. To download Wireshark for Linux, Ubuntu, NetBSD and more, just go to the Third-Party Packages section.
How to Install Wireshark on Windows 11/10/8/7 & macOS
How to install Wireshark on Windows or macOS?
In Windows, double-click on the .exe file to the setup welcome interface, review the license agreement, choose which features you want to install, decide whether to create shortcuts, select the destination folder (by default, it is C:\Program Files\Wireshark), check the box of Install Npcap to capture live network traffic, and the installing process begins. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish the operation.
To install Wireshark on macOS, double-click the .dmg file to open and then you can get a .pkg file. Then, the welcome screen appears. Just follow the instructions on the screen to start the installation.
After downloading & installing Wireshark, now you can use Wireshark to capture network traffic and analyze data on your PC. Just take action if you need this tool.
