If you are a network administrator, you're under a lot of pressure to ensure that mission-critical systems are completely safe from malicious code, buffer overflows, stealth port scans, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, CGI attacks, and other network intruders. Designing a reliable way to detect intruders before they get in is an essential--but often overwhelming--challenge. Snort, the defacto open source standard of intrusion detection tools, is capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP network. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching, and matching. Snort can save countless headaches; the new "Snort Cookbook" will save countless hours of sifting through dubious online advice or wordy tutorials in order to leverage the full power of SNORT.

Each recipe in the popular and practical problem-solution-discussion O'Reilly cookbook format contains a clear and thorough description of the problem, a concise but complete discussion of a solution, and real-world examples that illustrate that solution. The "Snort Cookbook" covers important issues that sys admins and security pros will us everyday, such as:

installation

optimization

logging

alerting

rules and signatures

detecting viruses

countermeasures

detecting common attacks

administration

honeypots

log analysis

But the "Snort Cookbook" offers far more than quick cut-and-paste solutions to frustrating security issues. Those who learn best in the trenches--and don't have the hours to spare to pore over tutorials or troll online for best-practice snippets of advice--will find that the solutions offered in this ultimate Snort sourcebook not only solveimmediate problems quickly, but also showcase the best tips and tricks they need to master be security gurus--and still have a life.

This book teaches IT professionals how to analyze, manage, and automate their security log files to generate useful, repeatable information that can be use to make their networks more efficient and secure using primarily open source tools. The book begins by discussing the Top 10 security logs that every IT professional should be regularly analyzing. These 10 logs cover everything from the top workstations sending/receiving data through a firewall to the top targets of IDS alerts. The book then goes on to discuss the relevancy of all of this information. Next, the book describes how to script open source reporting tools like Tcpdstats to automatically correlate log files from the various network devices to the Top 10 list. By doing so, the IT professional is instantly made aware of any critical vulnerabilities or serious degradation of network performance. All of the scripts presented within the book will be available for download from the Syngress Solutions Web site.
Almost every operating system, firewall, router, switch, intrusion detection system, mail server, Web server, and database produces some type of log file. This is true of both open source tools and commercial software and hardware from every IT manufacturer. Each of these logs is reviewed and analyzed by a system administrator or security professional responsible for that particular piece of hardware or software. As a result, almost everyone involved in the IT industry works with log files in some capacity.
* Provides turn-key, inexpensive, open source solutions for system administrators to analyze and evaluate the overall performance and security of their network
* Dozens of working scripts and tools presented throughout the book are available for download from Syngress Solutions Web site.
* Will save system administrators countless hours by scripting and automating the most common to the most complex log analysis tasks"