This would help you analyze large amounts of data more effectively. For example, in the wireless networking space, you could assign all data packets one color, management packets a second color, and control packets a third. You can create custom colors to highlight certain characteristics of the packets. The second theme I noted was the importance of using profiles and color schemes within Wireshark. This makes it easier to indentify when there are notable security or performance events occurring on the network. Several presenters suggested that you do a baseline packet capture of a known-good environment to see what the packet flow looks like when everything is working. The first is the importance of having a good baseline. I identified two themes throughout the presentations I attended. Each track had awesome presenters, including Mike Kershaw (creator of Kismet), Ryan Woodings (Chief Geek at MetaGeek), and Laura Chappell (Founder of Wireshark University). The conference was broken up into three tracks - one for basic users, another for advanced users, and yet another for developers. Last month, I attended the second annual Sharkfest conference, which was held June 15 th -18 th at Stanford University. In fact, version 1.2 of the software was released the first day of the conference. Wireshark is available as a free download for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and others. It is a multiday conference focused on both wireless and wired packet analysis with the Wireshark protocol analyzer.

The key event for such packet analysis professionals is Sharkfest. I see a brunette.' The analyst was bragging about his packet analysis skills - his ability to look beyond each bitwise field and see the bigger picture. The analyst responds (I'm paraphrasing here) 'All you see is ones and zeros.

Do you love packet analysis as much as I do? If so, then you'll probably remember the scene in the movie 'The Matrix' where Neo is looking at the Matrix over one of the analysts' shoulders and asks what's on the screen.

Packet analyzers