Breathe easily: protect your Linux box with Snort
An intrusion detection system – or IDS – is a high-tech burglar alarm, keeping a watchful eye on your computer and alerting when computer or network activity indicates unauthorised or malicious activity. An IDS is a must-have app, and Snort is rapidly becoming the tool of choice.
Snort, with its funny name, has three primary operating modes. The first two are not really intrusion related and merely reads network packets received and displays them on screen or to disk. In these modes, Snort acts as a network sniffer and packet logger. These in themselves can be useful applications, but is not where Snort really shows its stuff.
Snort’s third operating mode – network intrusion detection – is when the magic happens. Here, Snort actually pays attention to the network traffic passing its electronic eyes and matches what it sees according to a database of updatable signatures as well as any custom user-defined rules. In this mode, Snort does for networks what anti-virus tools do for filesystems.
What’s best is it still runs when you’re asleep.
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re: Snort
Seeing a report with a zillion false alerts is hardly "protecting" your linux box. IDS is a huge waste of time, you don't need a app to tell you the net is a dangerous and nasty place. Put your boxes BEHIND a real firewall and then run IPS (not IDS) on the firewall.