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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Proofpoint Advanced Threat Protection
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Proofpoint Advanced Threat Detection is a suite of threat detection products including Attack Protection for Email, SaaS applications, Mobile Defense, Threat Response, and Threat Intelligence.
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.
It is great out of the box and uses AI and machine learning to identify threats with minimal input. It does need to be configured and tuned to meet the needs of the organisation. Industry specific software that sends or receives emails may be affected by this product.
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.
Automatic retrieval of malicious emails that have gotten through the filter but were later detected using sample data across all the organizations Proofpoint has as customers.
Proofpoint offers a lot of products, but they are not particularly well integrated. They all look different, and there is no central location to access them all from, which is disappointing. However, I do know they have a big push for upgrading the UI and usability, so this should improve in the coming months I hope.
Even though the product is good, the support can be lacking at times. The support needs to know their product inside and out, but there are times in which we figure out things before their support does. I feel as if we should not be able to fix issues that their support cant fix, hence the main reason for support.
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.
We use Proofpoint Threat Protection in conjunction with Microsoft 365. While Microsoft does have some very nice email security features that are getting better every day, we do think that Proofpoint is a value add and have no inclination to discontinue use or look for another product at this time.
