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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Splunk Cloud Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Splunk Cloud Platform is a data platform service thats help users search, analyze, visualize and act on data. The service can go live in as little as two days, and with an IT backend managed by Splunk experts.
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.
Splunk is excellent when all your data is in one location. Its ability to correlate all that data is intuitive (once the hurdle of learning the query language is overcome). It is also easy to standardize the presentation of information to the company. When data is siloed/standalone, other systems can be cheaper and faster to implement.
This SIEM consolidates multiple data points and offers several features and benefits, creating custom dashboards and managing alert workflows.
Splunk Cloud provides a simple way to have a central monitoring and security solution. Though it does not have a huge learning curve, you should spend some time learning the basics.
Splunk Cloud enables me to create and schedule statistical reports on network use for Management.
Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.
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.
Search Processing Language really is a game changer for writing easy-to-understand and maintainable queries on your data base logs. Once understood, setting up and validating a query can be done in no time- which leaves us the option to focus on more monitoring and improved services. We have no other tools that utilizes data this efficiently
