Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It is easy to use with sufficient documentation on how to use the tools for end users or newbies. Experienced testers will find it easy to customise and configure the test cases. Just wished that I could have taken up a course on using this tool in my study days so that I could had explored more and improved my familiarity with the tool, unlike when working where access and time to explore the other features of the tool is limited
Read full review Pros IPS detection. DoS detection. Packet logging. Read full review Scanning our network for new or existing vulnerable systems. Automation of manual tests and exploits to allow what used to be days of effort to be squeezed into hours. Metasploit has become an integral part in our validation of new systems before their inclusion in our production network. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Have encountered issues with updating especially after moving from BackTrack to Kali. Sometimes it gets a little buggy, but that's a rare occurrence. Read full review Support Rating We don't use it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Metasploit is an all around good suite of tools to test and validate potential vulnerabilites. Other tools have bits and pecies such as
Nmap , Nessus,
Burp Suite , etc. but Metasploit can function in the same way but more.
Read full review Return on Investment Being open source, ROI on free is hard to beat for something that works. I believe it greatly enhances the security of my network. Read full review If you prevent an attack you will save a lot of money. There is a free version that has a lot of useful exploits. You can run it in an open source OS. Read full review ScreenShots