Wireless Adaptor not seen by Wireshark

Assuming you don't have an Ethernet cable plugged into your system, select Capture > Interfaces. Now go browse a site using your WLAN connection. Return to your Capture Interfaces window. Do you see that any of your adadpters has seen packets? If so, there's your WLAN card.

You can rename the card for easier identification later. Go to Edit > Preferences > Capture > Interfaces:Edit and put in a comment like Native Wireless. When you look at Capture > Interfaces again, you'll see the new name.

From a mailinglist post from Gianluca Varenni back in 2008:

starting from Vista, wireless drivers can be old style (NDIS 5.x) working exactly like in Windows 2000/XP, or native Wifi drivers (NDIS6). In this case the driver is lightweight and delivers 802.11 frames to an intermediate driver (developed by MS) that converts 802.11 frames into cooked 802.3 frames that can be managed by the upper protocols like the TCP/IP stack. This intermediate driver is also responsible for managing association/disassociation, BSSID scans and such. And this intermediate driver is also responsible for filtering the requests coming from the upper protocols (like WinPcap) for the underlying device description, and always returning "Microsoft" instead of e.g. "Intel Wireless 4965 Adapter".

I haven't looked if there is a possible workaround to the problem, yet.

Do you have an adapter named "Microsoft"? If so, that is most likely your Wireless adapter.

The Problem with wireless adapters under Windows OS is, that although you might see your Wireless Card (under Vista/7 often labelled "Microsoft") under capture interfaces - you can only see traffic traversing your wireless card.

That means you have to be connected via an Access Point before you see any packets in Wireshark at your wireless capture interface. If you are only interested in monitoring your own traffic, first connect to an AP and then start Wireshark.

If you want to capture the "real" wireless traffic - that means including 802.11 frames for example for probe requests / responses and authentication details you have to have a capable wireless chipset and a driver supporting monitor mode. This is - like Laura already mentioned - done by AirPCAP from Cacetech for example.

If you like to test your wireless card for sniffing capabilities I recommend downloading a Linux Live CD or USB-Boot Version and running the aircrack-ng suite for testing. With airmon-ng and/or airodump-ng you can try to enable monitor mode for your wireless driver and capture "real" wireless 802.11 traffic for later analysis with wireshark.