Deep Packet Inspection Consortium

Protecting Against Patent Assertion Entities Targeting DPI

Artistic image of blue lines of code

A Brief History of Wireshark

In 1997 Gerald Combs started designing Ethereal, a network protocol analyzer for Solaris and Linux. He made the first public release in July 1998 and immediately started receiving contributions from developers around the world. Contributors added many of the features that are popular in Wireshark to this day, as well as support for other platforms, most notably macOS and Windows.

In 2006 Gerald contacted the authors of the WinPcap packet capture driver, Loris Degioanni and Gianluca Varenni, about improving wireless capture support on Windows. Subsequent conversations resulted in Gerald joining their company, CACE Technologies (now part of Riverbed Technology) and led to the development of the AirPcap wireless capture adapter for Windows. The move also resulted in changing the name of the project from Ethereal to Wireshark.

In 2008 Wireshark 1.0 was released during the first SharkFest developer and user conference. Due to the contributions of developers, users, and educators around the world Wireshark has won several industry awards and is the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer.