by JP Vossen
To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, banks do not depend solely on vaults to keep
their assets safe; they also employ intrusion detection and response mechanisms in
the form of alarms and guards. Your network, or more properly the data on
it, is one of the most important assets your company has. You already
protect it with a vault -- your firewall, and logical and physical network perimeter
security. But if you don't have alarms (intrusion detection systems) and guards (incident response), you are not as secure as you could
be.
Arguably one of the best network intrusion detection systems (IDS) is the free and open source Snort toolkit. It has a large and
active community, and is backed by the commercial company SourceFire, making Snort a
strong contender in the intrusion detection systems market. The package itself is free. All
that's required is some hardware to run it on and the time to install,
configure and maintain it. Snort runs on any modern operating system
(including Windows and Linux), but some consider it to be complicated to
operate. The goal of this guide is to take some of the mystery out of
Snort.
SNORT INTRUSION DETECTION AND PREVENTION GUIDE
Why Snort makes IDS worth the time and effort
How to identify and monitor network ports
How to handle network design with switches and segments
Where to place IDS network sensors
Finding an OS for Snort IDS sensors
How to determine network interface cards for IDS sensors
Modifying and writing custom Snort IDS rules
How to configure Snort variables
Where to find Snort IDS rules
How to automatically update Snort rules
How to decipher the Oinkcode for Snort's VRT rules
Using IDS rules to test Snort
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
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JP Vossen, CISSP, is a Senior Security Engineer for Counterpane Internet Security. He is involved with various open source
projects including Snort, and has previously worked as an information security consultant and systems engineer.
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