We have been covering several NirSoft utilities recently. Here is another interesting packet sniffer utility. A packet sniffer is a hardware piece or a computer program that intercepts traffic passing over a digital network. It can be useful in many ways like detecting network intrusion attempts, analyzing network problems, gathering and reporting network statistics, etc.
WebSiteSniffer is one such small packet sniffer application that captures all website files (HTML files, Flash, Video, images, scripts and other content files) automatically while browsing the Internet and stores them under a preferred folder.
The freeware is capable of working with any web browser, regardless of the browser cache settings.
It has the following requirements,
- WinPcap Capture Driver. It is an open source driver that permits you to capture network packets on Windows (any version:
- Microsoft Network Monitor (3.x) new version
- Microsoft Network Monitor Driver version (2.x) only for Windows 2000/XP/2003
To download and install WebSiteSniffer simply click on the link provided at the end of the article. Scroll the page to locate the ‘Feedback’ column and click on ‘Download WebSiteSniffer’ option to begin downloading.
Double-Click on the downloaded icon and click on ‘Extract’ to unzip and extract the contents of the zip-file to a preferred folder. You will soon find your file extracted. Simply run the executable file – WebSiteSniffer.exe.
After the application has been used, the main window of the program will display the general statistics of some downloaded files along with their host name, total size of the files (compressed/uncompressed) and total number of files for every file type.
Though useful in gathering and reporting network statistics, the freeware application has some shortcomings and limitations. It requires enabling of the ‘private browsing’ option for the capture of some files and is inefficient to capture files from secured websites.
Download WebSiteSniffer from here.
