Re: Fwd: Is snort an overkill for desktop only environment ?

[krymson () gmail com]

I don't think it would be overkill unless this is a completely useless office that has access to nothing. As Jason 
responded earlier, it depends on the data value. Snort will also have less value if the VPN is client-to-site, rather 
than site-to-site, since it won't be able to see the encrypted traffic, but that won't eliminate the value since you 
can still see if something evul is getting into or out of your office/desktops.

I think if you can get quality information about your environment, a monitoring tool is worthwhile effort. The Snort 
sensor can probably be tuned nicely to give very few alerts and far less false positives than a complex environment, 
depending on the web browsing habits.

Part of me really wants to say you can get good value out of netflow statistics for that office (ferrets out strange 
destinations or hours of activity), or making sure the desktops are behind a nicely hardened firewall (egress and 
ingress accounted for) along with a web proxy or filter, and some sort of ability to sense rogue (new) systems. But 
Snort is a great piece as well.

Regarding the 30 day lag time, I don't think that should be a huge problem, but yes it can be a small concern. It 
wouldn't kill my adoption of Snort in most environments, however, most likely because Snort is an alert mechanism and 
not necessarily a prevention mechanism. For prevention, I'd still rely on endpoint AV/security. I fall on the side of 
using IDS less as an active tool like an IPS, and more in the traditional detection/monitoring sense.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: martin <martiniscool (at) gmail (dot) com [email concealed]>
Date: 2009/10/22
Subject: Is snort an overkill for desktop only environment ?
To: security-basics (at) securityfocus (dot) com [email concealed]

Hi all

I've been reading up on IDP recently, and particularly started looking
at snort.  I'm considering suggesting to my boss that we install it at
a small branch office I'm based at.  However, all that we have at the
branch office are a few desktop PC's, a firewall, switch, and a
printer.  Our DC, file server etc, is at head office and accessed
using a VPN.

Is it worth installing IDP in simplified environment such as this ?
Or is it designed for more "complex" environments which have more
resources such as file servers, web servers etc ??

Also, currently we wouldn't have anything in the budget to pay for the
$500 rule subscription for one sensor - so all the rules we would be
getting would be 30 days old.  Is it worth having an IDP with rules
that are this old ?  Are they still of any value ?  I'm thinking back
to the conflicker threat last year - I know there was a Snort rule for
it, but without the subscription, we wouldn't have gotten it for 30
days.  So it would have been pretty much too late in that case.

I know that we can write our own rules, but I don't think anybody
would have time to do that.  So we'd be relying on what rules get
downloaded

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

thanks in advance
M

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