Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools

Rating:
Summary: One of the better discourses on Snort
Review: This is basically a book about intrusion detection using all open source tools. It starts with an introductory chapter that explains the problem of defining an intrusion and why it is becoming more and more of a problem. It follows up with a chapter on network traffic analysis including packet sniffing and using tcpdump and ethereal. Then comes the meat of the text - installing Snort. Of course to really understand how to use Snort you have to understand how attacks occur and the common methods used. The authors provide a really nice chapter on this subject. After that come five chapters on configuring, deploying, and managing Snort rules, intrusion prevention strategies, and tuning. Once Snort is up and running the authors examine the use of ACID and SnortCenter as Snort IDS management consoles. Either of these products drastically decreases the burden of analyzing what has happened and is happening on the intrusion detection forefront. The book ends with additional tools for Snort IDS management and implementation strategies for high-bandwidth situations.

There are other very good books on Snort but one of the things that makes this one particularly valuable is that it also looks at other open source tools and provides a good basic background on intrusion detection theory. Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools is highly recommended for those in charge of intrusion detection and prevention in a network environment and planning to implement a system their self.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent description of Snort
Review: Up to this point, I've only use simple firewalls for my home network. Not that I think there's anything really worth hacking on my home network, but I thought I'd spend a little time learning about intrusion detection. This book is great for several reasons. First, it is well put together and easy to follow. Second, it describes in detail the open source project Snort. Finally, it satisfied my curiosity about IDS (Intrusion detection systems) - I'm not an expert, but I now understand the concepts.

Even though the book did not mention OS X specifically, it was easy to get snort compiled and installed on my Mac. There were a few tweaks I had to do, but if you're familiar with "configure; make; make install", it should be a snap. (Likewise, fink or darwinports can get you going with Snort as well). Any other flavor of Unix/Linux would be that much easier to install.

Beyond just describing how to install and configure Snort, the book does go into some detail about how networks are attacked and how Snort goes about alerting you to possible intrusive behavior. There are also numerous reference to web sites and other books to find more information. It also goes into detail on various other tools that augment and complement Snort.

Very well done.

Rating:
Summary: educate yourself in IDS
Review: Welcome to Snort! More broadly, this book works well as a practical explanation of the general field of Intrusion Detection Systems. Key affiliated tools are covered, like tcpdump and Ethereal. Which are also free and open source, just like Snort. There is a general and I think understandable bias in this book towards such tools. The authors claim, and you must have heard this before, that such tools are often more likely to be bug free and mature than proprietary tools.

If you work your way through the chapters, then you can get a good education in the main ideas like setting up prevention strategies and how to look for evidence of attacks. Instantiated via using Snort. But if you're smart, you can generalise this. Plus, keep an eye out for any useful techniques that Snort currently lacks. If you find these, perhaps you can build a high value tool off them? Don't take Snort as the last word in these matters.