Re: Announcement: Alert Verification for Snort

[Michael Stone <mstone () mathom us>]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 05:49:29PM -0700, Michael Sierchio wrote:
> Not so, IMHO.  Attempts at intrusion are of interest, reconnaissance
> is of interest 

In what way? Excluding security researchers and infowar types--focusing
on end-user consumers--what is to be done with that information? I
guarantee that right now every machine on the internet is being hit by
probes. It's a fact of life. But let's say that a small business owner
has a magic box that tells him that he's been hit by 1M scans
today--what should he do with that information? Physical world analogies
are inappropriate because in the physical world you don't have people
constantly walking by and beating on your door. Strategically, on a
large scale, accross organizations, or for certain types of
organizations, it can make sense to know about attempts. But in the
general case for the overworked, understaffed part time security team
that's the normal case that information is no more than noise.

Mike Stone


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