An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) has alerted the network administrator to a possibly malicious sequence of packets sent to a Web server in the network's external DMZ. The packet traffic was capture

A protocol analyzer (such as Wireshark) is specifically designed to read PCAP capture files and decode packet contents across all protocol layers, enabling detailed inspection of headers, payloads, and sequences. This allows an administrator to manually examine the flagged packets and apply expert judgment to confirm or deny malicious intent.

A network sniffer captures live traffic from the wire and saves it, but by itself does not provide the deep protocol decoding and analysis needed to evaluate whether a specific saved sequence of packets is malicious.

An Intrusion Prevention System actively blocks traffic in real time based on signatures or rules, and cannot retroactively analyze a PCAP file to assess whether previously captured packets represent a false positive.

A vulnerability scanner probes systems to find known weaknesses and misconfigurations, and is not capable of inspecting packet capture files to evaluate the nature of specific traffic.