Why Snort makes IDS worth the time and effort

The decision of whether to implement an intrusion detection system (IDS) is a complicated one. Unfortunately, IDS has a well-deserved reputation for requiring a lot of "care and feeding" and commercial systems can be very expensive. However, there is an enterprise-grade open source IDS called Snort that may tip the scales over to a "can't lose" position.

The Snort toolkit is free and runs on any modern operating system and any old hardware you have. The real investment in the Snort IDS is your time and effort, but I guarantee in less than a week you will learn things about your network you never knew. At the end of three months you will have fixed a number of network problems and intrusion detections that you previously didn't even know you had. For example, you may find a misconfigured management station that's using the SNMP community string 'public' for everything. We all know that's a bad thing, right?

In addition to learning about your network, you'll learn about the interesting world of malicious code. With Snort, rules are powerful, flexible and relatively easy to write, so new rules to detect the latest malware are often written by the Snort community within hours of an outbreak. Add one to your local or experimental rules file, restart Snort, and you're well on your way to detecting, containing and eliminating any infestation that makes it past your other layers of security.

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One of the best and most overlooked things about Snort IDS rules is that they are open source (for specific licenses see Snorg.org and Bleedingsnort.com). Ironically, both ISS RealSecure and Symantec ManHunt have modules that allow you to use Snort rules. But, the real beauty is that you can actually read a Snort rule, which is something you can't do with most commercial vendors. The best you get with them is a few paragraphs that someone wrote about the rule, which is not the same. Access to the actual rules allows you to make a very informed decision as to the exact criteria that caused an alert and the relevance to your environment.

Regardless of your needs or your reason for implementing Snort, I recommend you read the FAQs and join one of the mailing lists (especially Snort users) at Snort.org.

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