RE: Israeli Software Company Faces U.S. Probe

["Ryan Counts" <rcounts () parkplacetexas com>]

> From the Washington Post article:

<snip>

Still, Sourcefire earned about 10 percent of its estimated $35 million
in revenues last year guarding classified U.S. computers, according to
Jeffrey W. Englander, a software security analyst at Boston-based
America's Growth Capital, a boutique investment bank and research firm.

</snip>

I think this is just a case of bad journalism.  They put snort at the
head of the article because it'll raise eyebrows, but the heart of the
matter is that Sourcefire does a lot of security work for the
government.

-----Original Message-----
From: funsec-bounces () linuxbox org [mailto:funsec-bounces () linuxbox org]
On Behalf Of Larry Seltzer
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 10:07 AM
To: funsec () linuxbox org
Subject: RE: [funsec] Israeli Software Company Faces U.S. Probe

> > The objections by the FBI and Pentagon were partly over specialized
intrusion detection software known as "Snort," which guards some
classified
U.S. military and intelligence computers. 

This sounds perilously close to complete nonsense. I'm guessing from the
story that the real issue for the government is that Sourcefire has some
important contracts protecting sensitive classified systems and that the
software is not straight Snort. OTOH, Snort is GPL; is it possible that
they
are concerned about a GPL program falling into the wrong hands?

Larry Seltzer
eWEEK.com Security Center Editor
http://security.eweek.com/
http://blog.ziffdavis.com/seltzer
Contributing Editor, PC Magazine
larryseltzer () ziffdavis com 


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