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CheckPoint Acquires Snort
bobdehnhardt writes "The Snort-announce list was burning with the news that CheckPoint has signed an agreement to acquire Sourcefire, the commercial arm of the Snort community. As part of the agreement, CheckPoint will "continue to develop and distribute Snort under the GPL, improve and document the program to stay on the cutting edge and expand the snort.org web site." Here is a message from Snort creator Marty Roesch."
" Here is a message from Snort creator Marty Roesch."
I'm rich I'm rich I'm filthy f*ckin rich!
Checkpoint needs this type of network awareness technology to keep up with Cisco
I know they lost my company's contract because the network admins like the way Cisco stuff integrates
I'll start by stating again what I've stated in the past, Snort is now and will continue to be free to end-users. We will continue to develop and distribute the Snort engine under the GPL, improve and document the program to stay on the cutting edge and expand the snort.org web site. The community continues, as always, to be important to us as a group of people who use the code pervasively throughout the entire Internet, report on problems and make suggestions and contributions to the project.
This is critical to me for many reason. It's good to see. Marty is a man of integrity & I'll bet this is in the aquisition contract
Check Point to acquire privately held Sourcefire for a total consideration of approximately $225 million.
Who says you can't make money from FOSS?
Marty deserves the fiduciary rewards he'll get for all his hard work over the years
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
No, it doesn't. The owner of the copyright can stop releasing new versions under the GPL. Any code already licensed under the GPL would remain so, but nothing stops them from making all new versions closed, or something in between.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
It's worth mentioning that it's possible to trigger on known attack VECTORS rather than just known attacks - that is, on some vulnerabilities, all possible attacks will have a single signature at some point in the packet, which WILL be triggered. Moreover, some PROTOCOLS will always have the same signature, which may be hit as byproducts of the attack (ie: if I see an IRC packet coming from a webserver, I'm going to alert no matter what port it's on, or where it's going, because it shouldn't be there, period).
Snort can be bypassed in many scenarios, but it's still very useful.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
This is no big deal. Snort will continue to be GPL and freely available to the world.
I'm more worried about the recent Nessus changes, have you heard about this?
Nessus License Change Announcement
Nessus 2 will continue to be free
Nessus 3 will be a free of charge, binary only release
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Plus you might find that a shellcode exploit requires a shellcode sled, which can be detected. And many of the people who use Snort might not know that Sourcefire has made a major innovation with RNA -- a passive traffic analysis system which tells you what hosts are in your LAN, and what ports are being used -- kind of like NTOP, but with better consolidation and reporting.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Everything happening on your network should be authorized by you. If you're worried about security, then you need to get some benchmarks of the legitimate traffic on your network so you can have the system watch for different patterns.
Unless they accepted patches from a third party not directly involved in the project , They would need to track down each and every person that had (and acquire their blessing) or each and every code snippet and remove it .
This is the same problem which faces the linux Kernel if they wished to move it to the GPL3
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
when he tried to cross the border with snort.
*DrugCheese rants*
Kate Moss unavailable for comment.