Snort vs. Security Onion vs. Tripwire Enterprise

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

Security Onion works well for setting up within a Linux environment. This brings a new platform to run and maintain though. The application its self has helped to keep track of logs and vulnerabilities in the environment. Alert triage and case creation is simple to start and follow through to the end.

Tripwire Enterprise is great for hosting/data center environments and it greatly helps where console screenshots and reporting fill a lot of our client internal audit needs for security and change control.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• GUI
• Support
• Easy of use

• It allows us to track development changes for engineer accountability.
• Tripwire Enterprise also allows us to monitor changes/updates being done to our systems in our hosting centers.
• We use the software to track user access and critical system changes.

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

• Requires Linux
• Training

• In previous versions the management console was a little hard to navigate in some respects.
• I'm sure this has changed over time but we hope the reporting system has gotten more granular.
• I really don't have to many cons for this product, I recommend it for every company I work for!

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

Other vendors may have a more robust solution but for our needs, Security Onion was the one to move forward with. We have tested some of the others but the cost of those platforms makes the ROI not as desirable. There is a learning curve with Security Onion but it is worth it for the value provided.

Honestly, I haven't used other products to do what Tripwire does, it's always my first recommendation.

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.

• Makes Alert Triage easier to handle
• Analysis of threats simple

• Tripwire has been a positive business impact for us because of its trusted name. Our customers require software like Tripwire because they know their data and security concerns are in good hands when it's deployed.
• The ROI for Tripwire is also a positive for our business because of the time and man power saved in due diligence and reporting for our clients' internal auditing.

Incentivized