Snort vs. Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System (TPS)

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

Great for large enterprises 10k users or more and as part of defense in depth. Medium and small business you are better off looking for a cheaper UTM solution that does it all in one. It comes down to cost, are you willing to fund the cost of breaking out IPS functionality or moving towards a unified solution?

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Tipping point had a very nice GUI interface that sat on top of snort rules. It was easy to access, had nice customization of dashboards and output to syslog for SIEM solutions.
• It was easy to configure rule sets, allow groups or singular allow/blocks or white-listing.
• Security rule sets could be tweaked up or down and allow/drops signatures could be configured to help increase performance.

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

• Biggest qualms I had with TippingPoint was that it was just a tad on the expensive side for what you get. Nowadays everything has gone UTM in firewalls and they do it all including IPS as part of the basic functionality so really, TP is losing a massive market share.
• Don't see a future in the roadmap with so many other vendors getting onto the "unified" wagon and adding IPS as part of their service and at a cheaper price.

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

Most other firewall UTM solutions, Cisco, Palo Alto, Fidelis, etc.

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.

• Negative cash flow, positive addition to our defense in depth strategy at one of the largest healthcare organizations in Georgia (at that time).

Incentivized