The new owner took up the sponsorship of the Wireshark project with enthusiasm and devoted company resources to improving the development and distribution of the system. In 2010 Riverbed Technologies bought CACE Technologies and became the new employer of Gerald Combs. Thus, Combs changed the name of his packet analyzer as it developed into a more sophisticated tool. However, the name Ethereal belonged to his former employees. Despite being open to all, the code was copyrighted to Combs. By this time, he had set up Ethereal in a repository, making the code available to others, and he received regular contributions from other unpaid developers. In 2006, Combs went to work for CACE Technologies.

The technician worked for an ISP and needed a utility for his use in his duties. Wireshark was initially called Ethereal, and it was first developed in 1998 by Gerald Combs as an alternative to expensive packet analyzer tools. However, unlike many open source projects, this development is well funded, and the code is regularly analyzed and updated – the latest release of the system occurred in July 2021 with version 3.4.7. The system is old, being first released in 1998. Wireshark is a free packet analyzer that was developed as an open-source project.

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