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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Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
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.
We use it because when a user sees the suspicious activity on his account, Microsoft Sentinel gives alerts to the user's system and the admin system as well. When a user of one of our systems clicked a spam email, that email was trying to install a virus on our server, but Microsoft Sentinel gave an alert to the user and admin both, so that is why our team was able to fix that issue with Microsoft Sentinel very fast. However, it will not be the best option for you if your team is utilizing every feature but you are on a tight budget.
The threat intelligence from Cisco TALOS is unparalleled. This is grafted into the Sourcefire application which greatly improves security visibility. With this there are a lot of groups that you can use for white listing or blacklisting, knowing its being updated in the background without additional work from you.
Flexible. Instead of putting a traditional firewall inline you can put a source fire appliance (or firewall with sourcefire on-board) to not only block/allow traffic, but if you insights into it, and do some forms of threat scoring.
In depth information. Sometimes a bit overwhelming, but you are able to do more than just see alerts, you can view the full information and packets that lead to the conclusion, though the conclusion is prepared in advance for you.
It is a good tool for threat detection and analysis of the threats. We are using this tool for real time threat detection on our employee machines as well as some servers.
It provides various options for collecting data sources by leveraging multiple sources using data connectors. This helps us in gathering data from multiple sources such as our servers as well as our employee machines.
One good thing about this tool is automated incident response thereby increasing the security of servers.
It takes some time to learn how to use and install it properly, and it does not connect effectively with external PaaS systems such as Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and so on.
Microsoft can simplify the display of the logs to make them easier to study, and the user interface occasionally delays, which can also be enhanced.
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
Snort was chosen mainly for the ease and cost. With Snort we was able to set up in a matter of minutes without any professional services needed. If you are used to packet tracing the old fashion way, this is the product for you.
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
