RE: IDS

[shankarnarayan.d () netsol co in]

Hi,

Snort definitely is a good IDS, but given that Snort is free, it is going to
be difficult to get signatures as quickly and as easily as you would on a
commercial IDS. Given snort is free, it takes time before people detect and
then write signatures for the attacks. Snort does give you the capability to
add and modify signatures as you please - but this is also available in
commercial signatures. 
Additionally, there are many types of IDS - what are you looking at - there
is the adaptive/ anomaly detection IDS which understands and gets a baseline
of the activities that go on your network and then flag anything that is
unusual as an attack - ofcourse this could lead to a lot of false alarms -
but this is the new way that the industry is going to - how effectively you
can fine tune this is dependent on your efficiency
The other side is the signature based IDS where the attacks are detected
based on signatures only and the third category is a combination of the two
- 

So pick what you want based on what data you want to protect and you level
of confidence - what is the level of criticality of the data, what type of
users you have on the network - if they are more of the networking software
development kind OR if they are the protocol stack writers, are they the
extremely nosy bunch that regularly plays on the production network, do they
frequently download off the web and try these tools on the network
etc...............

IDS' are aplently - but it is necessary what type of IDS you wan to test
before you jump into it - examples also include the Dragon IDS (there were
eval copies available till sometime back - dunno if they are still there),
there are the Cisco IDS, Black ICE, Real Secure, Net Prowler etc

So long..............

shankar

-----Original Message-----
From: Endre Szekely-Bencedi [mailto:Endre.Szekely-Bencedi () hu-tcs com] 
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 3:47 PM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: IDS

Hi List,

I'd like to ask you to recommend some IDS I could test. Our company is 
about 100-120 PCs large at the
moment, that could increase to up to 400 in the near future. I am 
currently trying eTrust IDS v1.5 but it reports
many false alarms, also it just reports the half of the traffic as 'other 
protocols' so I really can't get much useful
information from that.
Is Snort's software any good? It is free, and that's just nice. I was 
thinking to try it one of these days when I'll
have a bit of spare time. Should I bother with the Windows version or I 
should just put it on a Unix machine?

Any other tips, software that can do traffic logging/analysis/intrusion 
detection?

Thanks.

PS: Please, CC me the answers as I don't have much time to read mails 
usually so I might delete it along with
        the many other mailing list mails if I'm hurrying.

Greetings,
Endre Szekely-Bencedi
_____________________________________
Tata Consultancy Services 
H-1054 Budapest, Kalman Imre u. 1.
Tel.: +36 1 4751214 
FAX: +36 1 475 1111 
Email: Endre.Szekely-Bencedi () hu-tcs com
_____________________________________

"THIS E-MAIL MESSAGE ALONG WITH ANY ATTACHMENTS IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE 
ADDRESSEE and may contain confidential and privileged information. If the 
reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are notified 
that any dissemination, distribution or copy of this communication is 
strictly prohibited. If you have received this message by error, please 
notify us immediately, return the original mail to the sender and delete 
the message from your system."


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethical Hacking at the InfoSec Institute. Mention this ad and get $545 off 
any course! All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 10 students or less 
to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
Attend a course taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field 
pen testing experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Master the
skills 
of an Ethical Hacker to better assess the security of your organization. 
Visit us at: 
http://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/ethical_hacking_training.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethical Hacking at the InfoSec Institute. Mention this ad and get $545 off 
any course! All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 10 students or less 
to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
Attend a course taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field 
pen testing experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Master the skills 
of an Ethical Hacker to better assess the security of your organization. 
Visit us at: 
http://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/ethical_hacking_training.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------