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Monitoring Networks with Snort IDS-IPS

Networks are the data highways upon which you build your digital transformation infrastructure. Like interstate highways transmit goods, networks transmit data. Every connected user and device is a network digital on-ramp. When malicious actors gain unauthorized access to networks, organizations must detect and contain them as quickly as possible, requiring security analysts to embark on a digital high-speed chase.

 

Monitoring networks with Snort IDS/IPS enables you to detect suspicious activity so that you can catch criminals before they cause irreparable harm.

 

What is Snort?

Snort is an open-source tool that provides real-time network traffic analysis, enabling security teams to monitor for suspicious activity. IT and security teams can use Snort in three different ways:

Snort can detect a wide variety of attacks and intrusion patterns, and then it generates alerts with suggested actions to take.

 

Snort rules use a flexible language to combine:

 

 

Every rule contains the following information in the header:

 

 

Is Snort a sniffer?

Snort uses packet sniffing techniques to capture and analyze network traffic. However, the tool is more than just a packet sniffer. It uses protocol analysis and content matching to identify specific types of network traffic when identifying malicious activity and suspicious behavior. Snort has three basic modes.

 

Sniffer mode

When only reading and displaying a continuous stream of packets from the network, you can configure Snort to show:

 

Packet logger mode

When logging the packets to disk, you can configure Snort to show:

 

Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) mode

Snort detects and alerts you to suspicious network traffic through two key capabilities:

 

 

Snort offers several different alert modes, each containing different information:

What are the benefits of using Snort?

Snort’s content matching and protocol analysis capabilities enable it to detect various network security issues.

Malicious packets

Snort’s performs real-time traffic analysis that can detect malicious payload including:

Threats

Snort detects various threats including:

Backdoor attacks

By analyzing network activity, Snort can detect attempts to exploit known vulnerabilities in operating systems (OS) and software that attackers use to install backdoors and gain unauthorized network access.

Zero-day attacks

Since Snort can detect abnormal activity on your network, it can help identify zero-day attacks that leverage new protocols or misuse existing ones by identifying deviations from expected protocol behavior. For example, Snort can detect attacks originating from potentially compromised sources, like infected devices being used as a botnet or malicious IP addresses.

Intrusion prevention

You can configure Snort to take prevention actions that include:

 

Correlating Snort IDS data with other events

By correlating Snort data with other events, you can create high-fidelity alerts, reducing false positives and alert fatigue. Securing and monitoring your networks is critical to your data protection program. While Snort provides real-time network traffic monitoring and analysis, you can’t gain all the data’s value unless you’re correlating it with other information from across your environment. As your organization adapts its monitoring and moves towards a zero trust architecture, using centralized log management with security analytics enables you to create a more complete view of your complex digital ecosystem.

 

 

Firewalls

By correlating your Snort and firewall data , you can gain valuable context around what’s happening in your environment. While both technologies inspect and analyze packets, firewall data can provide context about:

 

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

With people working remotely, you can correlate Snort and IAM events to mitigate risks arising from credential-based attacks. By combining data from these two technologies, you can gain visibility into the following:

 

Endpoints

Enriching your Snort data with endpoint security logs enables you to combine network monitoring with malware events. By correlating this data, you can more rapidly investigate the devices trying to transmit malicious packets to your networks.

Threat intelligence

You can add context to your Snort data with threat intelligence feeds. This context enables you to correlate your network activity data with things like:

 

Graylog Security: Getting value from your Snort IDS/IPS

With Graylog Security, you get access to all of our pre-built content to get the search templates, dashboards, correlated alerts, reports, dynamic lookup tables, streams, and pipelines you need so that you can gain value from your logs faster. Using this pre-built content, you get alert rules, anomaly detectors, and dashboards that work across various log sources, enabling you to build high-fidelity alerts that correlate your Snort data with mission-critical log data, including those for endpoints and access. Included with your Graylog Security or Graylog Operations subscription, this content provides everything you need to ingest, sort, and process logs correctly so that you can enrich even messages and optimize your Graylog instance’s performance.

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