A possibly malicious sequence of packets that were sent to a web server has been captured by an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and was saved to a PCAP file. As a network administrator, you need to d

An Intrusion Prevention System operates inline on live network traffic to block threats in real time and cannot open or analyze saved PCAP files.

A vulnerability scanner probes live hosts or applications for known weaknesses and is not designed to parse or analyze packet capture files.

A protocol analyzer such as Wireshark can open PCAP files and decode packet contents at each protocol layer, allowing a network administrator to inspect headers, payloads, and traffic patterns to identify malicious sequences. This offline, deep-inspection capability makes it the best tool for forensic analysis of a saved packet capture.

A network sniffer captures live traffic from a network interface and is optimized for collection rather than the deep protocol-level forensic decoding of a pre-saved PCAP file.