WinDump

In this article, we will discover what WinDump is and why it’s often used by many network professionals today.

Overview

In today’s market, some of the most powerful and highly rated Unix command-line tools have windows ports that are also popular among technical administrators. WinDump is a version of Tcpdump for windows that can be utilized when it comes to network traffic analysis in the premise of discovering active malware activities on the network. Tcpdump is initially an efficient tool for capturing as well as reporting packet headers in network traffic, for future or more intensive analysis. The application of network traffic dumping cannot be limited, as there are numerous possibilities when it comes to applying dumping to network traffic. In recent times, tech administrators have used WinDump to check if malware was installed on a given machine by examining the nature of the device to see if packets were being broadcasted from the computer when they should have been free of any activity. 

This program also has the attribute of capturing and reporting packet data with matching information on their headers aside from the ability to log all traffic on the network; this is a beneficial attribute if the user already has an idea or know what they are looking for and want to be more direct in getting things done. 

How WinDump Works

The WinDump program comes in two parts. The first part contains a set of network capture drivers called WinCpap; this is used by the WinDump to collect packet-level access to network interfaces located in the computer. The program itself is the second part, WinDump, invoked from the line of command after the WinPcap library has been successfully installed. When using the WinDump program, the –D option will be the first every user should use, seeing as it gives a list of every available network interface on the system at the moment. The program is built in a way that allows it to listen to the first available interface, in windows; however, the software dial-up adapter takes this position and is not a physical network adapter.  *WinCpap is no longer supported, Npcap can be installed.

What makes WinDump stand out

A more attractive feature and attribute of WinDump is found in its ability to decrypt any form of network traffic sent through IPsec. WinDump requires the user to have the ESP secret key particular to the IPsec in use compile Tcpdump application, enabling the cryptography option. With the –F switch, users can specify an external file with file parameters. This will, however, make the program turn a blind eye to any file parameter presented to the command line.