A security analyst recently read a report about a flaw in several of the organization's printer models that causes credentials to be sent over the network in cleartext, regardless of the encryption settings. Which of the following would be best to use to validate this finding?

Wireshark is a packet analyzer that captures and displays network traffic, making it the ideal tool to validate if credentials are being sent in cleartext. By capturing traffic from the printer, the analyst can inspect the packets and confirm if sensitive information is unencrypted. Netcat is a network utility for reading from and writing to network connections, useful for basic port scanning or data transfer, but not for detailed packet analysis. Nessus is a vulnerability scanner that identifies security weaknesses but doesn't directly show real-time cleartext transmission. Nmap is a network scanner used for discovery and security auditing, primarily for identifying hosts and services, not for analyzing packet content.