Best IDS/IPS solution

Winner: Sourcefire for Snort
www.snort.org

Since its creation 10 years ago, Snort has been recognized as one of the leading technologies in the security industry. Based on its strong and loyal open source community, Snort has become the single most widely deployed intrusion prevention and detection technology in the world. Snort delivers dramatic speed, power and performance, which all contribute to it being the de facto standard for intrusion detection and intrusion prevention. Snort continues to deliver leading detection and prevention capabilities – not only as a standalone product, but within other leading enterprise solutions.

As an open source solution, Snort's source code and rules are continuously reviewed and tested by security professionals worldwide. With this feedback, Snort continues to evolve the industry's most comprehensive protection against today's dynamic threats. It continues to be one of the most popular IDS/IPS solutions with over 205,000 registered users. Snort is supported by the open source community, Snort Development team and Sourcefire's Vulnerability Research Team (VRT), a group of leading intrusion prevention experts working to discover, assess and respond to the latest trends in hacking activity, intrusion attempts and vulnerabilities. Sourcefire VRT Rules for Snort lead the industry in delivering protection for users, often leading the way in addressing Microsoft Tuesday vulnerabilities. VRT Rules are vulnerability-based vs. exploit-based, meaning that a single VRT Rule will detect every attack against a known vulnerability, resulting in fewer false positives, zero false negatives, and less frequent updates.

Snort's open source roots are its greatest asset. Because the source code is open and non-proprietary, innovation and development occur at an accelerated pace compared to proprietary models. The success is due to a vast community of security experts that continually review, test and improve the code. Simply, users in the open source security community worldwide can detect and respond to bugs and other security threats faster and more efficiently than in a “closed” environment.

Finalists 2009