NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows. NetworkMiner can be used as a passive network sniffer/packet capturing tool in order to detect operating systems, sessions, hostnames, open ports etc. without putting any traffic on the network. NetworkMiner can also parse PCAP files for off-line analysis and to regenerate/reassemble transmitted files and certificates from PCAP files.

The purpose of NetworkMiner is to collect data (such as forensic evidence) about hosts on the network rather than to collect data regarding the traffic on the network. The main view is host centric (information grouped per host) rather than packet centric (information showed as a list of packets/frames).

NetworkMiner has, since the first release in 2007, become popular tool among incident responce teams as well as law enforcement. NetworkMiner is today used by companies and organizations all over the world.

NetworkMiner can extract files and certificates transferred over the network by parsing a PCAP file or by sniffing traffic directly from the network. This functionality can be used to extract and save media files (such as audio or video files) which are streamed across a network from websites such as YouTube. Supported protocols for file extraction are FTP, TFTP, HTTP and SMB.

User credentials (usernames and passwords) for supported protocols are extracted by NetworkMiner and displayed under the "Credentials" tab. The credentials tab sometimes also show information that can be used to identify a particular person, such as user accounts for popular online services like Gmail or Facebook.


Another very useful feature is that the user can search sniffed or stored data for keywords. NetworkMiner allows the user to insert arbitrary string or byte-patterns that shall be searched for with the keyword search functionality.

NetworkMiner Professional comes installed on a specially designed USB flash drive. You can run NetworkMiner directly from the USB flash drive since NetworkMiner is a portable application that doesn't require any istallation. We at Netresec do, however, recommend that you copy NetworkMiner to the local hard drive of your computer in order to achieve maximum performance.