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

• 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

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

Incentivized

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

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

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

Incentivized

• 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