Why pay a proprietary vendor a ton of money for a security application you can get for little or no money?

Maybe you think open source doesn't have the chops for security. Sure, you're using Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and other open source applications in mission critical situations. You're using open source network management tools, like Nagios or OpenNMS, the latter of which is a complete enterprise network management solution. None of this worries you, but you don't feel comfortable using open source tools for IT security.

Wake up and smell the coffee!

Even better, wake up and look at the applications. In this story, I will discuss the pros and cons of the open source security tools that work on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 (RHEL4) platform. These include Snort (intrusion detection), Nessus (security scanning software) and Tripwire (host-based operating system intrusion detection).

Full Story.