Snort vs. Security Onion

If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.

Incentivized

Security Onion works well for setting up within a Linux environment. This brings a new platform to run and maintain though. The application its self has helped to keep track of logs and vulnerabilities in the environment. Alert triage and case creation is simple to start and follow through to the end.

• The threat intelligence from Cisco TALOS is unparalleled. This is grafted into the Sourcefire application which greatly improves security visibility. With this there are a lot of groups that you can use for white listing or blacklisting, knowing its being updated in the background without additional work from you.
• Flexible. Instead of putting a traditional firewall inline you can put a source fire appliance (or firewall with sourcefire on-board) to not only block/allow traffic, but if you insights into it, and do some forms of threat scoring.
• In depth information. Sometimes a bit overwhelming, but you are able to do more than just see alerts, you can view the full information and packets that lead to the conclusion, though the conclusion is prepared in advance for you.

Incentivized

• GUI
• Support
• Easy of use

• There are plenty of false positives in the logs, but no problems noticed related to them.

• Requires Linux
• Training

Snort was chosen mainly for the ease and cost. With Snort we was able to set up in a matter of minutes without any professional services needed. If you are used to packet tracing the old fashion way, this is the product for you.

Incentivized

Other vendors may have a more robust solution but for our needs, Security Onion was the one to move forward with. We have tested some of the others but the cost of those platforms makes the ROI not as desirable. There is a learning curve with Security Onion but it is worth it for the value provided.

• The Sourcefire deployment has been very good at actively blocking threats that would have potentially caused loss or compromise.
• It has given us great visibility to our network.

Incentivized

• Makes Alert Triage easier to handle
• Analysis of threats simple