Intrusion Detection with Snort

I teach networking and security courses at a local unversity, and I have been using this book for a portion of the courseware this semester. A significant portion of the course is hands-on, and this book helps my students understand how intrusion detection is used in the real world. The chapter on creating rules from packet captures is invaluable --- as is the Snort internals chapter. I understand how Snort works, how to deploy it, and most importantly, the pragmatic side of using Snort in the real world. This is by far the best of the Snort books out right now, the others are either low on detail or are extremely poorly written. The Snort 2.0 book was disappointing. I was expecting it to be the best book, it stuffed with filler chapters, and overly wordy.

This is one of those "essential, have to have" books. I just got through all of the examples and finished building out a 3-tiered snort network for the company where I work as a senior security engineer. We previously had some older, expensive, ISS realsecure equipment in place, and I made the case to managment to replace the RealSecure stuff with open-source Snort. It wasn't that hard, the maintence cost for an upgrade was going to be more than my whole entire Snort-based design. My company had good experiences with apache on red hat, so it wasn't a super hard sell. Times are tough, and managment is looking for ways to cut costs.This book got me there. I was able to get the meaty technical details I needed, and couldn't find answers to online. Im a highly technical person, Im no (dummy) who gets scared of the command line. Id scoured the snort.org website, mailing lists, newsgroups, securityfocus lists, but they lacked in a lot of areas. Especially, the online articles dont talk about using snort in a corporate or enterprise-size setting. I picked up this book and I was able to put in a very highly effective tuned snort install. I also have moved on to advanced topics, like creating my own custom rules that apply only to my company's network. I use these 20 or so rules to catch traffic that is not supposed to be on my network, but might be normal somewhere else, so there is no offical snort.org rule for them. In short, this is the best book ive read in a few years, at least for a technical book.

Unlike the "Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection", this book talks more on intrusion detection. If you are a planner on intrusion detection, this book is a perfect match. If you are the engineer setting up snort, the "Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection" might be easier to follow.

I've seen a bunch of reviews for this book on security and open source websites on the internet. I usually don't buy paper books, I prefer to read online howtos and go to the library to check something out. I only buy something if I really think ill be able to get practical skills out of it (such as the Perl Cookbook, etc.) After reading the slashdot review on this book, I figured that it was time I learn snort and intrusion detection. Let me say first, if you are going to actually implement everything in this book, getting through it is going to take some time. This isn't the kind of thing you can learn totally in one night, or even one week. There are just tons of examples and intrusion detection strategies to work through. I like how the author goes through several real-world examples in each chapter, such as teaching you step by step on how to write a snort signature or rule from a raw packet capture. Nowhere on the internet have I seen this, trust me ive looked hard. Also, the book goes beyond using snort. There are a bunch of tools you need to use with snort in order for it to work well. Snort doesnt have any real time email alerting features, remote signature update tools, or even a GUI interface!! All of these things are seperate, and you can't really use snort in the real world without them. This is why I bought this book instead of the other 2 that are out there.

This is a book every system administrator or network engineer should have. Snort has always been one of those cool open source applications that I've wanted to use, but got frustrated when I couldnt figure out what is going on. Im a pretty busy person, and don't have time to figure out what ever damn preprocessor option does by trial and error. I could get snort up and and running, but never efficiently and it often took lots of work paging through megs of logfiles. In the end, i just plain gave up and went on to learning other security tools. This book shows me how to organize alerts, where to put my sensors, and how to build snort. It even has some stuff on intrusion prevention, which seems to be the all the buzz in todays security arena. Now, only if someone would write a good book on tripwire, id be all set!