For many years, WinPcap has been recognized as the industry-standard tool for link-layer network access in Windows environments, allowing applications to capture and transmit network packets bypassing the protocol stack, and including kernel-level packet filtering, a network statistics engine and support for remote packet capture.
WinPcap consists of a driver that extends the operating system to provide low-level network access and a library that is used to easily access low-level network layers. This library also contains the Windows version of the well-known libpcap Unix API.
Thanks to its set of features, WinPcap has been the packet capture and filtering engine for many open source and commercial network tools, including protocol analyzers, network monitors, network intrusion detection systems, sniffers, traffic generators and network testers. Some of these networking tools, like Wireshark, Nmap, Snort, and ntop are known and used throughout the networking community.
Winpcap.org is also the home of WinDump, the Windows version of the popular tcpdump tool. WinDump can be used to watch, diagnose and save to disk network traffic according to various complex rules.