Software update: Npcap 1.20

Previously, on the Windows platform, you had to rely on WinPcap when you wanted to capture or edit network traffic. However, its development was completely discontinued in 2013. Nmap, among others, made use of this packet capture library and these developers then started developing Npcap where several improvements can be found in. For example, recent libpcaps are supported, and it can receive or send loopback traffic. Npcap is used by several networking tools today, such as Nmap and Wireshark. The Npcap development team released version 1.00 last year and now update it with 1.20 as the version number. The announcement list is as follows:

Npcap 1.20 released

Nmap/Npcap Community:

I’m happy to report the release of version 1.20 of the Npcap Windows packet capturing/sending driver! It’s the first release of 2021 and includes better capabilities for selecting timestamp methods as well as many other improvements and bug fixes. These include updating the underlying libpcap library to version 1.10 and building our installer now with NSIS 3. More details on all this are available from the changelog: https://npcap.org/changelog . You can also read about the Npcap 1.10 release (from December) there since we didn’t announce that one here. We released a new Npcap SDK as well (version 1.07).

As always, you can download Npcap and its SDK from https://npcap.org . That page includes details on the Npcap OEM program for commercial use and redistribution too.

We have many ideas still in the pipeline, including ARM64 support, bundling tcpdump for simple console sniffing, building an MSI installer, WHQL certification, and numerous performance optimizations.

While Npcap is a critical part of Nmap on Windows, we’ve also made many improvements to Nmap proper. Stay tuned for those in the next release! We’re also working on upgrading Zenmap to Python3 and “Notarizing” Nmap for easier Mac OS X installation.

sincerely,
Gordon “Fyodor” Lyon