Darktrace AI interrupts in-progress cyber-attacks, including ransomware, email phishing, and threats to cloud environments. It's able to detect and establish baselines for your organization so it can make the distinction between what is and what isn't normal network activity for your organization. This allows it to tackle complex cyber-attacks as they happen and prevent future cyber-attacks from happening.
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pfSense
Score 9.5 out of 10
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pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
Darktrace is a product well suited for the vast majority of infrastructures and helps monitoring and responding to threats based on the network in a very elastic way. This is a product based on on-premise infrastructures that hosts its machines locally, of course it can be technically difficult to monitor an entire On-Cloud infrastructure but even there there's room for sensors and monitoring, not to mention the SaaS and mail integration that completes the product.
pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.
Uses it Al model UEBA to detect anomalies in the behaviour of not only the users in a corporate network but also the routers, servers, and endpoints in that network.
Provides a visualisation of both egress and outbound network traffics flowing in and out of the organisation.
Darktrace comes with it autonomous AI model detection and responses capabilities.
Darktrace as an AI next generation NDR solution, prevents ,contains and quarantines malicious traffics from and into the corporate network.
Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
There are few areas that I would say need to be improved; their customer support portal allows you to log tickets with any suggestions or things you feel the product is missing, and they will generally show you how to achieve what you want, or in some cases, introduce it as a feature in a later update.
I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.
Darktrace support is excellent in my experience. They send a competent engineer on-site to provide on-boarding training. They were also very responsive in responding to questions and concerns. Having an individual point of contact who is a competent network and security engineer is not a common experience, at least for me.
We did NOT select Darktrace. OSSIM/AlienVault is a more mature product and it provided better intelligence and reporting. The end user interface is much easier to use - and you can tell built form engineers who have had to do the work. My suggestion for anyone considering Darktrace, is to get the price upfront; do a 30/60 onsite trail; and do the same thing, at the same time, with AlienVault. AlientVault will win every time. I say that because that's exactly what I did.
Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.
One big positive is how it helps us with the security assessments that clients have done on us. They are looking to see if we know how we might have unusual/malicious traffic running on the network.
If you have a small network and only need 1 appliance, it can be a good ROI and peace of mind.
You could go down a hole in trying to spend time looking at all of your traffic with this software. You need to focus only on what it is showing as potential bad traffic.
pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.
