Sourcefire developed Snort, an open source intrusion prevention system capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging. Snort was acquired (and is now supported) by Cisco in 2013.
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Lacework
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Lacework is a cloud-native application protection platform offered as-a-Service; delivering build-time to run-time threat detection, behavioral anomaly detection, and cloud compliance across multicloud environments, workloads, containers, and Kubernetes.
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.
Lacework is well suited for behavioral analysis. One thing to consider thought is in the early stages there will be quite a bit of noise generated by Lacework. There will be a higher volume alerts generated initially - until a good baseline is generated. Overall Lacework is good with alert handling - integration with Slack is good.
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.
Compared to Sysdig Falco (the free open-source IDS), Lacework helps security teams by providing actionable alerts and a user-friendly interface that gives you an overview of all workloads being monitored, and detailed insights into these workloads if needed. Falco requires you to build your own integration and interface around it, including a mechanism to whitelist certain alerts. This made it harder for the security team to focus their time on potential intrusions.
Being a FinTech company, financial institutions who partner with us want to know that we are appropriately maintaining a Security, Risk and Compliance program that maintains a level of comfort for their vendor management. Lacework gives us the ability to monitor and maintain a level of security for our infrastructure that puts our partners at ease, reduces the revenue cycle for new partners and opens doors to the future.
