Intrusion detection is not for the faint at heart. But, if you are a network administrator chances are you're under increasing pressure to ensure that mission-critical systems are safe--in fact impenetrable--from malicious code, buffer overflows, stealth port scans, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, CGI attacks, and other network intruders.Designing a reliable way to detect intruders before they get in is a vital but daunting challenge. Because of this, a plethora of complex, sophisticated, and pricy software solutions are now available. In terms of raw power and features, SNORT, the most commonly used Open Source Intrusion Detection System, (IDS) has begun to eclipse many expensive proprietary IDSes. In terms of documentation or ease of use, however, SNORT can seem overwhelming. Which output plugin to use? How do you to email alerts to yourself? Most importantly, how do you sort through the immense amount of information Snort makes available to you?Many intrusion detection books are long on theory but short on specifics and practical examples. Not Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools. This new book is a thorough, exceptionally practical guide to managing network security using Snort 2.1 (the latest release) and dozens of other high-quality open source other open source intrusion detection programs.Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools covers reliable methods for detecting network intruders, from using simple packet sniffers to more sophisticated IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems) applications and the GUI interfaces for managing them. A comprehensive but concise guide for monitoring illegal entry attempts, this invaluable new book explains how to shut down and secure workstations, servers, firewalls, routers, sensors and other network devices.Step-by-step instructions are provided to quickly get up and running with Snort. Each chapter includes links for the programs discussed, and additional links at the end of the book give administrators access to numerous web sites for additional information and instructional material that will satisfy even the most serious security enthusiasts.Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools maps out a proactive--and effective--approach to keeping your systems safe from attack.

This all new book covering the brand new Snort version 2.6 from members of the Snort developers team.This fully integrated book and Web toolkit covers everything from packet inspection to optimizing Snort for speed to using the most advanced features of Snort to defend even the largest and most congested enterprise networks. Leading Snort experts Brian Caswell, Andrew Baker, and Jay Beale analyze traffic from real attacks to demonstrate the best practices for implementing the most powerful Snort features. The book will begin with a discussion of packet inspection and the progression from intrusion detection to intrusion prevention. The authors provide examples of packet inspection methods including: protocol standards compliance, protocol anomaly detection, application control, and signature matching. In addition, application-level vulnerabilities including Binary Code in HTTP headers, HTTP/HTTPS Tunneling, URL Directory Traversal, Cross-Site Scripting, and SQL Injection will also be analyzed. Next, a brief chapter on installing and configuring Snort will highlight various methods for fine tuning your installation to optimize Snort performance including hardware/OS selection, finding and eliminating bottlenecks, and benchmarking and testing your deployment. A special chapter also details how to use Barnyard to improve the overall performance of Snort. Next, best practices will be presented allowing readers to enhance the performance of Snort for even the largest and most complex networks. The next chapter reveals the inner workings of Snort by analyzing the source code. The next several chapters will detail how to write, modify, and fine-tune basic to advanced rules and pre-processors. Detailed analysis of real packet captures will be provided both in the book and the companion material. Several examples for optimizing output plugins will then be discussed including a comparison of MySQL and PostrgreSQL. Best practices for monitoring Snort sensors and analyzing intrusion data follow with examples of real world attacks using: ACID, BASE, SGUIL, SnortSnarf, Snort_stat.pl, Swatch, and more.The last part of the book contains several chapters on active response, intrusion prevention, and using Snort's most advanced capabilities for everything from forensics and incident handling to building and analyzing honey pots. - This fully integrated book and Web toolkit covers everything all in one convenient package - It is authored by members of the Snort team and it is packed full of their experience and expertise - Includes full coverage of the brand new Snort version 2.6, packed full of all the latest information

If you are a network administrator, you're under a lot of pressure to ensure that mission-critical systems are completely safe from malicious code, buffer overflows, stealth port scans, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, CGI attacks, and other network intruders. Designing a reliable way to detect intruders before they get in is an essential--but often overwhelming--challenge. Snort, the defacto open source standard of intrusion detection tools, is capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP network. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching, and matching. Snort can save countless headaches; the new Snort Cookbook will save countless hours of sifting through dubious online advice or wordy tutorials in order to leverage the full power of SNORT.Each recipe in the popular and practical problem-solution-discussion O'Reilly cookbook format contains a clear and thorough description of the problem, a concise but complete discussion of a solution, and real-world examples that illustrate that solution. The Snort Cookbook covers important issues that sys admins and security pros will us everyday, such as: installation optimization logging alerting rules and signatures detecting viruses countermeasures detecting common attacks administration honeypots log analysis But the Snort Cookbook offers far more than quick cut-and-paste solutions to frustrating security issues. Those who learn best in the trenches--and don't have the hours to spare to pore over tutorials or troll online for best-practice snippets of advice--will find that the solutions offered in this ultimate Snort sourcebook not only solve immediate problems quickly, but also showcase the best tips and tricks they need to master be security gurus--and still have a life.

Nessus, Snort, and Ethereal Power Tools covers customizing Snort to perform intrusion detection and prevention; Nessus to analyze the network layer for vulnerabilities; and Ethereal to sniff their network for malicious or unusual traffic. The book contains an appendix detailing the best of the rest open source security tools. Each of these tools is intentionally designed to be highly customizable so that users can torque the programs to suit their particular needs. Users can code their own custom rules, plug-ins, and filters that are tailor-made to fit their own networks and the threats which they most commonly face. The book describes the most important concepts of coding and customizing tools, and then provides readers with invaluable working scripts that can either be used as is or further refined by using knowledge gained from the book. - Snort, Nessus, and Ethereal are the three most popular open source security tools in the world - Only book that teaches readers how to customize these tools for their specific needs by coding rules, plugins, and filters - Companion Web site provides all working code and scripts from the book for download

The average Snort user needs to learn how to actually get their systems up-and-running. "Snort Intrusion Detection" provides readers with practical guidance on how to put Snort to work. Opening with a primer to intrusion detection, the book takes readers through planning an installation to building the server and sensor.

This guide to Open Source intrusion detection tool SNORT features step-by-step instructions on how to integrate SNORT with other open source products. The book contains information and custom built scripts to make installation easy.

Intrusion Prevention and Active Response provides an introduction to the field of Intrusion Prevention and provides detailed information on various IPS methods and technologies. Specific methods are covered in depth, including both network and host IPS and response technologies such as port deactivation, firewall/router network layer ACL modification, session sniping, outright application layer data modification, system call interception, and application shims. - Corporate spending for Intrusion Prevention systems increased dramatically by 11% in the last quarter of 2004 alone - Lead author, Michael Rash, is well respected in the IPS Community, having authored FWSnort, which greatly enhances the intrusion prevention capabilities of the market-leading Snort IDS