Martin Roesch developed Snort in 1998 for Unix platforms. Dubbing it a "Lightweight Intrusion Detection System," Martin made the tool open source and the number of people using Snort has been growing ever since. In the summer of 2000, Mike Davis . . .
Martin Roesch developed Snort in 1998 for Unix platforms. Dubbing it a "Lightweight Intrusion Detection System," Martin made the tool open source and the number of people using Snort has been growing ever since. In the summer of 2000, Mike Davis created the first Win32 port of Snort, bringing a great tool to a whole new world of Windows users and bringing a world of Windows users to a different understanding of security. The tool has a small memory footprint and normally uses very little CPU power to do its job. The application runs quite socially with other applications, very rarely crashing or causing other programs to crash. And best of all, it is completely open source and free for anyone to use.

However, as with any security tool, it is easy to feel a false sense of security once it is up and running. One must appreciate Snort for what it is and use it for what it is best at, namely sniffing traffic looking for attack signatures. It must be remembered that Snort will only serve as one component in an effective security strategy: firewalls, log analysis, and good security policy are still important aspects of a secure network.

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