intercepting network data from a particular program

Question

Hello, im looking for a way to detect, and capture data being sent TO and FROM a specific program, ive attempted to use something like wireshark but it all seems to be a bunch of nonsense to me, so i was wondering if anybody could help me get the data, translate it into text, to allow for editing, and then to resend the new edited information on its way.

Answer 1

Look for Capture TCP stream feature/menu item in Wireshark.

Edit: It's actually Follow TCP Stream.

Answer 2

Wireshark is definitely the way to go. It'll capture the data going to a specific port (which you can probably correlate to a the program fairly easily). I hope this isn't happening over SSL though (wireshark isn't going to help you much if it is).

But if you have to reverse engineer the server's communication protocol, capturing the network packets is the least of your problems. Reverse engineering is difficult and can be fairly error prone as it's often based on guess work. My suggestion is to do this as a last resort: if the server is intended to communicate with the outside world, there's probably some protocol documentation floating around somewhere that will be much more reliable than a wireshark trace.