Amazon GuardDuty vs. Snort

In a multi-account/multi-tenant environment, GuardDuty often alerts us to possible malicious traffic before it becomes an issue. The ability to automatically enable GuardDuty creates baseline security which is crucial when an account is first created. It also helps greatly in environments where other users are able to create resources as often GuardDuty alerts us to insecure resources we did not know about. It can however sometimes be a little overzealous with its assessments alerting on benign activity which then requires suppression rules.

Incentivized

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

• Monitors outgoing connections from AWS resources to known malicious hosts.
• Monitors incoming connection to AWS resources from known malicious hosts.
• Integrates with other centralized logging solutions.

Incentivized

• IPS detection.
• DoS detection.
• Packet logging.

Incentivized

• Does not have the ability to add any custom monitors.

Incentivized

• At times can be unstable with Cisco bugs, require frequent upgrading.
• FTD images that are being pushed for ASAs are less efficient from an administration standpoint, no CLI.

Incentivized

For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a Barracuda Web Filter, but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.

Incentivized

• GuardDuty has helped us prevent possible security incidents multiple times which could have caused substantial damage.

Incentivized

• Being open source, ROI on free is hard to beat for something that works.
• I believe it greatly enhances the security of my network.