Voorheen was je op het Windows-platform aangewezen op WinPcap wanneer je het netwerkverkeer wilde opvangen of bewerken. De ontwikkeling daarvan werd echter in 2013 volledig gestaakt. Onder andere Nmap maakte gebruik van deze packet capture library en deze ontwikkelaars zijn toen begonnen met het ontwikkelen van Npcap waar verschillende verbeteringen in terug te vinden zijn. Zo worden recente libpcaps ondersteund, en kan het loopbackverkeer opvangen of versturen. Npcap wordt tegenwoordig door verschillende netwerktools gebruikt, zoals Nmap en Wireshark. Het ontwikkelteam van Npcap heeft afgelopen jaar versie 1.00 uitgebracht en deze nu van een update voorzien met 1.30 als het versienummer. De aankondiging daarvan ziet er als volgt uit: Npcap 1.30 released Hi folks. The Nmap Project is pleased to release Npcap version 1.30 at https://npcap.org. We hope Nmap and Wireshark users will be especially happy with the raw WiFi improvements, since you tend to be particularly savvy about low-level network inspection. It turns out that some of the issues we thought were caused by lower level hardware drivers were actually bugs in our driver. Oops! But at least that means we can fix them ourselves, and we did. This release also includes substantial performance improvements, especially for applications which repeatedly call pcap_findalldevs(). That has been a sore point in the past, so Dan Miller went in and restructured the whole system for better performance. Wireshark starts up noticeably faster. Memory allocations were also optimized by replacing GlobalAlloc() calls with the modern HeapAlloc() system. You can read about all the improvements in this and previous Npcap releases at https://npcap.org/changelog. Please note that Nmap 7.91 still comes with Npcap 1.00 and Wireshark doesn’t yet have this new Npcap 1.30 either (though they do a terrific job keeping up to date). Fortunately, any Nmap or Wireshark user can get the improvements by just downloading and installing Npcap 1.30 from https://npcap.org. You don’t need to re-install Nmap or Wireshark themselves. You can check your current Npcap version in “Add/Remove Programs” or run “nmap -V”. As always, you can download Npcap and its SDK from https://npcap.org. That page includes details on the Npcap OEM program for commercial use and redistribution too. Enjoy the new release! Sincerely, Gordon “Fyodor” Lyon Changelog
