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Wireshark Sample Captures

license: see source

The Wireshark project's catalogue of sample PCAPs across hundreds of protocols — the widest protocol coverage available.

Summary

Formats
pcappcapng
License
license: see source
Added
2026-09-10

Get it

From the project’s own instructions where it documents any; otherwise a plain clone.

  1. Download from wiki.wireshark.org ↗

    Start from the source page, or use the commands below.

  2. shell
    $ curl -LO https://wiki.wireshark.org/uploads/__moin_import__/attachments/SampleCaptures/dns.cap

    Various DNS lookups.

  3. shell
    $ curl -LO https://wiki.wireshark.org/uploads/__moin_import__/attachments/SampleCaptures/SkypeIRC.cap

    Some Skype, IRC and DNS traffic.

  4. shell
    $ curl -LO https://wiki.wireshark.org/uploads/__moin_import__/attachments/SampleCaptures/ipp.pcap

    CUPS printing a test page over IPP.

Use it with

Commands are curated, not yet run by us.

Suricata — Replay the capture through your ruleset and write eve.json to out/.

sample.pcap
$ suricata -r sample.pcap -l out/

Zeek — Parse the capture offline; Zeek writes conn.log, dns.log, http.log and friends to the current directory.

sample.pcap
$ zeek -r sample.pcap

Wireshark — Print a one-line summary per packet with tshark, Wireshark's command-line reader.

sample.pcap
$ tshark -r sample.pcap

Snort3 — Read the capture with your Snort 3 configuration and print alerts to the console.

sample.pcap
$ snort -c /usr/local/etc/snort/snort.lua -r sample.pcap -A alert_fast
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