History

In the late 1990s, Gerald Combs, a computer science graduate of the University of Missouri–Kansas City, was working for a small Internet service provider. The commercial protocol analysis products at the time were priced around $1500 and did not run on the company's primary platforms (Solaris and Linux), so Gerald began writing Ethereal and released the first version around 1998. The Ethereal trademark is owned by Network Integration Services.

In May 2006, Combs accepted a job with CACE Technologies. Combs still held copyright on most of Ethereal's source code (and the rest was re-distributable under the GNU GPL), so he used the contents of the Ethereal Subversion repository as the basis for the Wireshark repository. However, he did not own the Ethereal trademark, so he changed the name to Wireshark. In 2010 Riverbed Technology purchased CACE and took over as the primary sponsor of Wireshark. Ethereal development has ceased, and an Ethereal security advisory recommended switching to Wireshark.

Wireshark has won several industry awards over the years, including eWeek, InfoWorld, and PC Magazine. It is also the top-rated packet sniffer in the Insecure.Org network security tools survey and was the SourceForge Project of the Month in August 2010.

Combs continues to maintain the overall code of Wireshark and issue releases of new versions of the software. The product website lists over 600 additional contributing authors.