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Date:      Thu, 8 Mar 2001 13:42:08 -0800
From:      Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
To:        Peter Brezny <peter@black.purplecat.net>
Cc:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: New to Snort.
Message-ID:  <20010308134208.D88665@mollari.cthul.hu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10103081233130.27988-100000@black.purplecat.net>; from peter@black.purplecat.net on Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 12:35:47PM -0500
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.10103081233130.27988-100000@black.purplecat.net>

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On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 12:35:47PM -0500, Peter Brezny wrote:
> am i in big trouble?

No: snort is a tool for identifying packets which match certain rules.
Which ruleset you use determines what types of packets it will match,
and these can be arbitrary, even unrelated to security.  Like all
tools, snort is only useful if you understand what it's telling you
and what it means.

The rulesets which snort ships with tend to generate a large number of
false positives, especially on busy networks.  You either need to tune
them by hand, or use a more restrictive ruleset (I use and recommend
the ArachNIDS ruleset from www.whitehats.com/ids -- but the same
conditions apply as described above, for example on my DSL line at
home I get an nmap ping (usually spoofed) about every 3 seconds from
someone.  If I was a cluebie I'd probably be in a blind panic about
someone trying to hack my box, but instead I know it's just someone
who desperately wants to get a response out of my IP address for port
scanning purposes, perhaps because they don't know how to use nmap
properly.  Since I have a properly configured firewall, I have nothing
to worry about from this rule, and in fact I've removed it to keep my
log file size sane.)

As noted by the other respondant, snort questions should go to the
snort-users list.

Kris

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