The Wireshark Foundation on Thursday announced the general availability of Wireshark 3.0.0, the newest release of the popular open-source packet analyzer.
The latest version fixes a handful of bugs and introduces roughly two dozen new features or significant updates to existing features.
One of the most important changes is the fact that WinPcap, the tool used for capturing and transmitting network packets, has been replaced with Npcap on Windows. The problem is that WinPcap has not been updated since 2013 and is no longer maintained, while Npcap received an update roughly half a year ago and is still actively maintained by the Nmap Project.
Another advantage of Npcap, besides better security and some advanced functionality not present in WinPcap, is the fact that its drivers have been tested and signed by Microsoft, allowing users to run it on Windows 10, which has stricter signing requirements.
Wireshark 3 also removes some legacy features and support for older versions of third-party tools, such as Qt, GLib, GnuTLS, and Python. The latest version of Wireshark also adds support for tens of new protocols.
Installers and source code for Wireshark 3.0.0 are available on the Wireshark website.
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