Called "the leader in the Snort IDS book arms race" by Richard Bejtlich, top Amazon reviewer, this brand-new edition of the best-selling Snort book covers all the latest features of a major upgrade to the product and includes a bonus DVD with Snort 2.1 and other utilities. Written by the same lead engineers of the Snort Development team, this will be the first book available on the major upgrade from Snort 2 to Snort 2.1 (in this community, major upgrades are noted by .x and not by full number upgrades as in 2.0 to 3.0). Readers will be given invaluable insight into the code base of Snort, and in depth tutorials of complex installation, configuration, and troubleshooting scenarios. Snort has three primary uses: as a straight packet sniffer, a packet logger, or as a full-blown network intrusion detection system. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching/matching and can be used to detect a variety of attacks and probes. Snort uses a flexible rules language to describe traffic that it should collect or pass, a detection engine that utilizes a modular plug-in architecture, and a real-time alerting capability.
A CD containing the latest version of Snort as well as other up-to-date Open Source security utilities will accompany the book. Snort is a powerful Network Intrusion Detection System that can provide enterprise wide sensors to protect your computer assets from both internal and external attack. This book gives completely updated and comprehensive coverage of snort 2.1. It includes free CD with all the latest popular plug-ins, and also provides step-by-step instruction for installing, configuring and troubleshooting.

This all new book covering the brand new Snort version 2.6 from members of the Snort developers team.

This fully integrated book and Web toolkit covers everything from packet inspection to optimizing Snort for speed to using the most advanced features of Snort to defend even the largest and most congested enterprise networks. Leading Snort experts Brian Caswell, Andrew Baker, and Jay Beale analyze traffic from real attacks to demonstrate the best practices for implementing the most powerful Snort features.

The book will begin with a discussion of packet inspection and the progression from intrusion detection to intrusion prevention. The authors provide examples of packet inspection methods including: protocol standards compliance, protocol anomaly detection, application control, and signature matching. In addition, application-level vulnerabilities including Binary Code in HTTP headers, HTTP/HTTPS Tunneling, URL Directory Traversal, Cross-Site Scripting, and SQL Injection will also be analyzed. Next, a brief chapter on installing and configuring Snort will highlight various methods for fine tuning your installation to optimize Snort performance including hardware/OS selection, finding and eliminating bottlenecks, and benchmarking and testing your deployment. A special chapter also details how to use Barnyard to improve the overall performance of Snort. Next, best practices will be presented allowing readers to enhance the performance of Snort for even the largest and most complex networks. The next chapter reveals the inner workings of Snort by analyzing the source code. The next several chapters will detail how to write, modify, and fine-tune basic to advanced rules and pre-processors. Detailed analysis of real packet captures will be provided both in the book and the companion material. Several examples for optimizing output plugins will then be discussed including a comparison of MySQL and PostrgreSQL. Best practices for monitoring Snort sensors and analyzing intrusion data follow with examples of real world attacks using: ACID, BASE, SGUIL, SnortSnarf, Snort_stat.pl, Swatch, and more.

The last part of the book contains several chapters on active response, intrusion prevention, and using Snort's most advanced capabilities for everything from forensics and incident handling to building and analyzing honey pots.

Nessus, Snort, and Ethereal Power Tools covers customizing Snort to perform intrusion detection and prevention; Nessus to analyze the network layer for vulnerabilities; and Ethereal to sniff their network for malicious or unusual traffic. The book contains an appendix detailing the best of the rest open source security tools. Each of these tools is intentionally designed to be highly customizable so that users can torque the programs to suit their particular needs. Users can code their own custom rules, plug-ins, and filters that are tailor-made to fit their own networks and the threats which they most commonly face. The book describes the most important concepts of coding and customizing tools, and then provides readers with invaluable working scripts that can either be used as is or further refined by using knowledge gained from the book.

Ethereal is the #2 most popular open source security tool used by system administrators and security professionals. This all new book builds on the success of Syngress' best-selling book Ethereal Packet Sniffing.

Wireshark & Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer Toolkit provides complete information and step-by-step Instructions for analyzing protocols and network traffic on Windows, Unix or Mac OS X networks. First, readers will learn about the types of sniffers available today and see the benefits of using Ethereal. Readers will then learn to install Ethereal in multiple environments including Windows, Unix and Mac OS X as well as building Ethereal from source and will also be guided through Ethereal's graphical user interface. The following sections will teach readers to use command-line options of Ethereal as well as using Tethereal to capture live packets from the wire or to read saved capture files. This section also details how to import and export files between Ethereal and WinDump, Snort, Snoop, Microsoft Network Monitor, and EtherPeek. The book then teaches the reader to master advanced tasks such as creating sub-trees, displaying bitfields in a graphical view, tracking requests and reply packet pairs as well as exclusive coverage of MATE, Ethereal's brand new configurable upper level analysis engine. The final section to the book teaches readers to enable Ethereal to read new Data sources, program their own protocol dissectors, and to create and customize Ethereal reports.