If a user wishes to visualize network traffic to check for suspicious activities, which tool is commonly used?

Wireshark is widely recognized as a premier tool for visualizing and analyzing network traffic. It provides a user-friendly graphical interface that enables users to capture network packets in real-time and dissect them for detailed examination. This visualization capability is crucial for spotting suspicious activities, such as unusual port traffic, packet anomalies, or potential data exfiltration attempts.

Users can apply various filters to focus on specific protocols, IP addresses, or other criteria, making it easier to identify irregular patterns that could indicate security issues. The detailed view includes packet details, communication sessions, and flow statistics, all of which are essential for threat analysis and network troubleshooting.

In contrast, other tools serve different functionalities. Tcpdump, while powerful for packet capturing, operates through a command-line interface and does not provide the same level of visual analysis that Wireshark does. Netcat is more of a networking utility used for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP but lacks sophisticated traffic analysis features. Nmap is primarily a network scanning tool designed for discovering hosts and services on a computer network, rather than specific traffic visualization.