As someone who understands the concept of network but has never professionally entered the field, i assume this just dumps a TCP packet to be inspected, correct?

[–] mkwt@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The tcpdumps I've worked with can also dump UDP, ICMP, and even ARP.

[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 13 hours ago

Tcpdump can also capture USB traffic!

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 14 hours ago

Yes, but before I used it I assumed that its scope was pretty much limited to what you just mentioned. Instead it can operate on most protocols both above and below layer 4, and it is incredibly useful as a traffic capture tool to produce a .pcap on a remote headless machine which you can then load into Wireshark. The "dump" part is the interesting one, not the "tcp" ;)

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yes. Also learn about certs if you need to deal with encryption https etc.

[–] ohshit604@lemmy.halstead.host 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for the affirmation, I got reverse proxies and certificates relatively down, however I am struggling to understand headers and their purposes, I know Mozilla has great documentation regarding headers but lately I’ve gotten lazy, haha.

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

HTTP headers or headers in general? For the former I suggest Burp Suite to inspect and manipulate headers to see how things change, for the latter tcpdump/wireshark, to supplement your theory reading :)