IDS and IPS with Snort 3: Get up and running with Snort 3 and discover effective solutions to your security issues

Learn the essentials of Snort 3.0, including installation, configuration, system architecture, and tuning to develop effective intrusion detection and prevention solutions with this easy-to-follow guide

Key Features

• Get to grips with the fundamentals of IDS/IPS and its role in network defense
• Explore the architecture and key components of Snort 3 and get the most out of them
• Migrate from Snort 2 to Snort 3 while seamlessly transferring configurations and signatures
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

Snort, an open source intrusion detection and prevention system (IDS/IPS), capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging, is regarded as the gold standard in IDS and IPS. The new version, Snort 3, is a major upgrade to the Snort IDS/IPS, featuring a new design and enhanced detection functionality, resulting in higher efficacy and improved performance, scalability, usability, and extensibility. Snort 3 is the latest version of Snort, with the current version at the time of writing being Snort v3.3.3.

This book will help you understand the fundamentals of packet inspection in Snort and familiarize you with the various components of Snort. The chapters take you through the installation and configuration of Snort, focusing on helping you fine-tune your installation to optimize Snort performance. You’ll get to grips with creating and modifying Snort rules, fine-tuning specific modules, deploying and configuring, as well as troubleshooting Snort. The examples in this book enable network administrators to understand the real-world application of Snort, while familiarizing them with the functionality and configuration aspects.

By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to leverage Snort to improve the security posture of even the largest and most complex networks.

What you will learn

• Understand the key changes in Snort 3 and troubleshoot common Snort 3 issues
• Explore the landscape of open source IDS/IPS solutions
• Write new Snort 3 signatures based on new threats and translate existing Snort 2 signatures to Snort 3
• Write and optimize Snort 3 rules to detect and prevent a wide variety of threats
• Leverage OpenAppID for application detection and control
• Optimize Snort 3 for ideal detection rate, performance, and resource constraints

Who this book is for

This book is for network administrators, security administrators, security consultants, and other security professionals. Those using other IDSs will also gain from this book as it covers the basic inner workings of any IDS. Although there are no prerequisites, basic familiarity with Linux systems and knowledge of basic network packet analysis will be very helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Intrusion Detection and Prevention
2. The History and Evolution of Snort
3. Snort 3 – System Architecture and Functionality
4. Installing Snort 3
5. Configuring Snort 3
6. Data Acquisition
7. Packet Decoding
8. Inspectors
9. Stream Inspectors
10. HTTP Inspector
11. DCE/RPC Inspectors
12. IP Reputation
13. Rules
14. Alert Subsystem
15. OpenAppID
16. Miscellaneous Topics on Snort 3

Ashley Thomas is a security researcher at Dell SecureWorks and a member of the Counter Threat Unit team. Before this role, he was instrumental in building the iSensor, a proprietary network intrusion prevention system. Ashley has a master's in computer networking from North Carolina State University, and he also holds several other certifications, including CISSP, GCIA, GREM, GCLD, and GWEB. He has authored several papers on intrusion detection and holds several patents in this field.