WinPcap is the industry-standard tool for link-layer network access in Windows environments: it allows applications to capture and transmit network packets bypassing the protocol stack, and has additional useful features, 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 the 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 is the packet capture and filtering engine of 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 tools, like Ethereal, Nmap, Snort, WinDump, ntop are known and used throughout the networking community.

The installer is able to detect the newly released Beta1 of Microsoft Vista, and install WinPcap correctly.