Network Defense Essentials (NDE) 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

Tcpdump is a command-line packet analyzer tool that allows security professionals to capture and analyze network traffic. It is widely used due to its ability to filter traffic based on various criteria, such as IP addresses, protocols, and ports, making it a powerful tool for diagnosing network issues or monitoring suspicious activity in real-time. Tcpdump outputs traffic data in a readable format, which can then be analyzed by security analysts to glean insights about network behavior.

While Wireshark is a popular graphical tool for network analysis, it does not operate from the command line and is primarily used for a more visual representation of traffic, which might not be suitable for all environments. Snort is an intrusion detection system that uses rules to identify malicious traffic but is not fundamentally a traffic capture tool like Tcpdump. Pcap refers to the file format used to store captured network packets, but is not a standalone tool itself. Therefore, among the options given, Tcpdump is the most appropriate tool for command-line analysis of network traffic.