I was once tasked to perform some investigation on a packet capture (pcap) file to retrieve some information. Before I was given the task, I don’t even know anything about pcap file. Some simple research will tell you that it is a file that captures network traffic.

Interesting uh?

One of the best tool used in the industry for performing packet capturing would be no doubt, Wireshark. The tool itself has many features, which I am not going to do a step-by-step guide today. What I am going to share is actually a compiled list of sample pcap files.

You are right, a compiled list of sample pcap files consolidated by people in the community and listed together in the Wireshark Wiki. It is very useful to people learning Wireshark and want to perform some analysis or test out some features on good pcap files which has more variants of realistic network traffic, furthermore, the choices are vast and interesting (since you did not create it yourself, there are some element of surprise).

Check out the list: https://wiki.wireshark.org/SampleCaptures