Snort is a powerful Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that is used to monitor network traffic for abnormal or malicious activity.
Features
- Intrusion Detection: Snort analyses network traffic in real time and looks for signs of abnormal or potentially malicious activity such as vulnerability attacks, hacking attempts, denial of service (DDoS) attacks, network scans, etc.
- Multiple protocol support: Snort supports a variety of network protocols including TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP and many others. This allows it to analyse a variety of traffic types and detect different types of attacks.
- Rule support: Snort uses a flexible rule system to detect malicious activity. Users can create their own rules as well as use thousands of preconfigured rules from public databases such as the Emerging Threats Open Ruleset and Snort Subscriber Rule Set.
- Flexible deployment options: Snort can be deployed in a variety of scenarios, including monitoring network boundaries, internal network segments, virtualised environments and cloud environments. It can also operate in IDS and IPS modes.
- Resource-efficient and scalable: Snort is resource-efficient and can run on a variety of hardware types, including regular servers, virtual machines, and cloud environments.
Installation
You can install Snort by running the following command:
Running
Start Snort Service: If Snort isn't already running as a service, you can start it using the following command:
Monitor Logs (Optional): You may want to monitor Snort logs in real-time to observe any detected events. You can do this by tailing the Snort log file with the tail command. For example:
Testing with pcap Files (Optional): You can also test Snort's functionality by analyzing packet capture (pcap) files. Use the following command to analyze a pcap file:
Check Snort Status: To verify that Snort is running and actively monitoring the network, you can check its status using:
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