Snort vs. Kali Linux

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

Kali is quite honestly appropriate for use on a Test Lab, a Virtual Machine, it will even run on a Raspberry Pi. It is the most popular tool used in most all training courses. It can be uses in home labs, work labs and production environments to perform real life scans for vulnerabilities among other things. It is the most popular tool for Cybersecurity tool.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Provides high security.
• Does great job with penetration testing.
• Has good number of testing tools with in.

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

• Usage wise, it is tough for use by beginners. Can be improved.
• With Kali Linux have noticed driver related issues especially with Nvidia graphics cards.
• Kali Linux can be improved for use as a day to day OS.

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

The hard feature to be beat Kali with is the amount of preinstalled tools. I.e. Ubuntu is great but you would have to install each and every tool separately

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.

• Till now Kali Linux have not made a single penny negative impact on our companies business , its so powerful and useful at the same time for our company.

Incentivized