Sourcefire adds management for commercial Snort

Sourcefire, a company that sells a commercialized, appliance-based version of the open-source intrusion detection system (IDS) Snort, announced the availability of its OpenSnort Management Console Wednesday.

The OpenSnort Management Console works in conjunction with the OpenSnort Sensor IDS appliance, giving administrators one centralized point from which to manage all the sensors deployed across their enterprise, according to Martin Roesch, president of Sourcefire and the author of the original Snort application.

The new management console offers administrators a host of options for data analysis, administration and policy control, Roesch said. The console can aggregate and correlate data generated through the IDS, perform forensic data analysis and be used to create and deploy IDS signatures used to detect new attacks, he said. The console can also manage policy, installation and configuration of all the sensors on a network using either a graphical user interface or a command-line interface, Roesch said. Sensors can also be combined into groups and managed that way as well, he added.

Reports are generated in HTML, though PDF is planned, he said. Alerts are sent via Simple Network Management Protocol, syslogd, e-mail and pager, he added.

The OpenSnort Management Console is a 2U-high (approximately 3.5 inches), rack-mountable appliance, running on Linux, Roesch said.

The console costs $20,000, with each sensor it manages sold separately for $9,995.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.