Following up after reviewing various opinions and responses to our complaint regarding the lack of timely notification from Elastic:
It seems that many interpreted our statement as a criticism of Elastic’s article itself.
To clarify once again: our concern was never about the article’s content or its publication. We explicitly stated that we have no issue with the article being released—regardless of timing.
Our point was, and remains, that Elastic could have informed us earlier, allowing us the opportunity to respond or act accordingly. That courtesy was not extended.
As for the argument that Elastic had no obligation to notify us—frankly, we find that position so fundamentally misguided and unprofessional that it hardly warrants a response.
Moving forward, we plan to allocate development resources toward strengthening our DRM mechanisms. While this incident was not the result of a direct attack on our DRM, but rather the consequence of someone leaking their licensed copy of the software, it has highlighted the need for additional safeguards.
Our goal is to make it significantly harder for unauthorized redistribution to occur, even in cases of deliberate and/or accidental misuse by legitimate users. These enhancements will help us better protect our software and, by extension, the investment our customers have made in it.
We recognize that such measures typically require online authentication with each software launch, and we understand that this may not always be convenient for our users. To address this, we also intend to offer the option to request short-term offline licenses. This will allow customers to continue using our software without an active internet connection when necessary.
We want to take this opportunity to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the quality and performance our customers have come to expect. We remain dedicated to continuously improving our software to ensure you get the most value out of your investment.
The upcoming release of Shellter Elite v11.1 is now in its final testing phase—and the results are outstanding. It slices through every test scenario like a hot knife through butter, including those involving the most commonly used C2 frameworks favoured by our customers.
— The Shellter Project Team
Update: On July 13th, Raphael Mudge—the original creator of the Cobalt Strike C2 Framework—shared his perspective on the incident. We sincerely appreciate his generous support and the thoughtful statement he offered. You can read his full remarks here.
