analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark

analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark is a skill for Claude Code from mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills. It costs 49 tokens per session (2,756 once invoked), scanned B, original, Apache-2.0.

A network investigation guide for capturing and examining packets with Wireshark and tshark, its command-line companion. It covers suspicious traffic, protocol problems, extracted files, and evidence from authorized network segments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate command-and-control traffic, data theft, lateral movement, malware communications, retransmissions, fragmentation, DNS failures, firewall rules, IDS alerts, and artifacts recovered from captured sessions.
Why use it?
It helps verify what traffic is really crossing a network instead of relying only on alerts or summaries. Investigators can use the captured evidence to understand intrusions, malware communications, and network faults.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the cybersecurity-skills plugin — 56 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate command-and-control traffic, data theft, lateral movement, malware communications, retransmissions, fragmentation, DNS failures, firewall rules, IDS alerts, and artifacts recovered from captured sessions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark
About the project

Anthropic Cybersecurity Skills is a library of structured cybersecurity procedures for AI agents, covering security domains and mappings to established security frameworks. It is for authorized security analysis, penetration testing, incident response, research, defense, and education across compatible AI platforms. The catalogue entries package parts of this library as agent skills, instructions, or a plugin.

mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills · 32,677 stars · on GitHub · mahipal.engineer

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills --skill analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cybersecurity-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,756 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 Apr 2026
  • Snyk fail 6 Apr 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Privilege Escalation · line 45
    Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
    Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00049 $0.02756
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01378
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00551
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00276

Measured 13d ago against content hash 79f1843a3381, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark scanned grade B with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/agent.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

- Root/sudo privileges or membership in the `wireshark` group for live packet capture

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "http.user_agent contains \"curl\" or http.user_agent contains \"Wget\""
Origin

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark/SKILL.md · 235 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 235 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analyzing Network Traffic with Wireshark

When to Use

  • Investigating suspected network intrusions by examining packet-level evidence of command-and-control traffic, data exfiltration, or lateral movement
  • Diagnosing network performance issues such as retransmissions, fragmentation, or DNS resolution failures
  • Analyzing malware communication patterns by capturing traffic from sandboxed or isolated hosts
  • Validating firewall and IDS rules by confirming what traffic is actually traversing network segments
  • Extracting files, credentials, or indicators of compromise from captured network sessions

Do not use to capture traffic on networks without authorization, to intercept private communications without legal authority, or as a substitute for full-featured SIEM platforms in production monitoring.

Prerequisites

  • Wireshark 4.0+ and tshark command-line utility installed
  • Root/sudo privileges or membership in the wireshark group for live packet capture
  • Network interface access (physical NIC, span port, or network tap) to the monitored segment
  • Sufficient disk space for packet capture files (estimate 1 GB per minute on busy gigabit links)
  • Familiarity with TCP/IP protocols, HTTP, DNS, TLS, and SMB at the packet level

Workflow

Step 1: Configure Capture Environment

Set up the capture interface and filters to target relevant traffic:

# List available interfaces
tshark -D

# Start capture on eth0 with a capture filter to limit scope
tshark -i eth0 -f "host 10.10.5.23 and (port 80 or port 443 or port 445)" -w /tmp/capture.pcapng

# Capture with ring buffer to manage disk usage (10 files, 100MB each)
tshark -i eth0 -b filesize:102400 -b files:10 -w /tmp/rolling_capture.pcapng

# Capture on multiple interfaces simultaneously
tshark -i eth0 -i eth1 -w /tmp/multi_interface.pcapng

For Wireshark GUI, set capture filter in the Capture Options dialog before starting.

Step 2: Apply Display Filters for Targeted Analysis

# Filter HTTP traffic containing suspicious user agents
tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "http.user_agent contains \"curl\" or http.user_agent contains \"Wget\""

# Find DNS queries to suspicious TLDs
tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "dns.qry.name contains \".xyz\" or dns.qry.name contains \".top\" or dns.qry.name contains \".tk\""

# Identify TCP retransmissions indicating network issues
tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "tcp.analysis.retransmission"

# Filter SMB traffic for lateral movement detection
tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "smb2.cmd == 5 or smb2.cmd == 3" -T fields -e ip.src -e ip.dst -e smb2.filename

# Find cleartext credential transmission
tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "ftp.request.command == \"PASS\" or http.authbasic"

# Detect beaconing patterns (regular interval connections)
tshark -r capture.pcapng -Y "ip.dst == 203.0.113.50" -T fields -e frame.time_relative -e ip.src -e tcp.dstport

Read the full file on GitHub · 235 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 235 lines · 49 tokens per session scan B 79f1843a3381

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analyzing-network-traffic-with-wireshark is a skill published in the GitHub repository mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills (32,677 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 2,756 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 2 findings (asks for root, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

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