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Mazen El-Mekawy

Mazen El-Mekawy

Aspiring Cyber Security SOC Analyst, passionate and ready to learn.

TryHackMe | TShark Challenge 1: Teamwork Write-up

4 min readJul 30, 2026

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This is my walk-through of the Tshark challenge room on tryhackme, hope you find it useful.

Scenario:

An alert has been triggered: “The threat research team discovered a suspicious domain that could be a potential threat to the organisation.”

The case was assigned to you. Inspect the provided teamwork.pcap located in ~/Desktop/exercise-files and create artefacts for detection tooling.

Your tools: TShark, VirusTotal.

Tasks:

1. What is the full URL of the malicious/suspicious domain address? Enter your answer in defanged format.

To identify the full URL of the malicious or suspicious domain address, we first navigate to the /desktop/exercise-files directory, where the .pcap file is located. This file contains the captured network traffic data that we need to analyse.

Next, we execute the following command:

[ tshark -r teamwork.pcap -T fields -e http.host | sort-r | uniq ]

This command uses tshark to read the “teamwork.pcap” file.

The “-T fields” extracts a specific field from the packets, in this case the “http.host” field specified using “-e http.host”.

“| sort -r | uniq” is used to sort the output in reverse order “showing the result that was found in more packets first” and to remove duplicate entries, showing us the desired results.

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Now we’ll try both URL’s on VirusTotal to find out which of them is the malicious one.

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The first URL “http://www.paypal.com4uswebappsresetaccountrecovery.timeseaways.com/…” was the malicious domain address, now we’ll use Cyberchef to defang the URL.

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Answer: hxxp[://]www[.]paypal[.]com4uswebappsresetaccountrecovery[.]timeseaways[.]com/

2. When was the URL of the malicious/suspicious domain address first submitted to VirusTotal?

To solve this question we’ll refer to the “Details” tab on VirusTotal.

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Answer: 2017–04–17 22:52:53 UTC

3. Which known service was the domain trying to impersonate?

Examining the URL “http://www.paypal.com4uswebappsresetaccountrecovery.timeseaways.com/…” we can clearly see that the attacker was attempting to impersonate “Paypal”, as an unsuspecting user would think this is a legitimate address by looking at the first part of the URL.

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Answer: PayPal

4. What is the IP address of the malicious domain?

Enter your answer in defanged format.

To answer this question we would need a command to extract the DNS quires and their source IP. The command should look like this:

[ tshark -r teamork.pcap -T fields -e dns.qry.name -e dns.a | sort -r | uniq ]

The “-T fields” extracts specific data from packets, and the “-e dns.qry.name” extracts dns query names, while the “-e dns.a” extracts the addresses associated with the query.

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The address associated with the malicious URL is “184.154.127.226”, defanging it on Cyberchef:

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Answer: 184[.]154[.]127[.]226

5. What is the email address that was used?

Enter your answer in defanged format. (format: aaa[at]bbb[.]ccc)

To get the Email address we can search for http POST requests and output the raw content of the http request packet.

To do this we’ll use the next command:

[ tshark -r teamwork.pcap -Y “http.request.method == POST” -T fields -e http.file_data ]

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The output of the http POST request reveals user and password credentials, the username is “johnny5aliv@gmail.com”

After defanging.

Answer: johnny5alive[at]gmail[.]com

Thank You..

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Mazen El-Mekawy

Written by Mazen El-Mekawy

Aspiring Cyber Security SOC Analyst, passionate and ready to learn.