Neil MacDonaldIs IDS dead? Not at all. I previously blogged that complete protection will require a combination of prevention and detection.
Protection = Prevention + Detection
We cannot and will not be 100% successful in preventing all attacks. Many organizations continue to spend an ever-increasing amount of the IT budget in a futile attempt to prevent all attacks. They’ve reached the point of diminishing returns with prevention technologies. But most clients I talk with have very little in the form of really good detection capabilities to help us understand if we have been compromised and don’t know it yet.
Some network and host-based IPS vendors will argue they already have IDS capabilities, arguing that any good IPS can be put into “detect” mode. However, they miss the point.
Detecting attacks is a fundamentally different problem than detecting intrusions.
Detecting attacks relies on models and patterns of what something bad looks like and then proceed to look for similarities. These systems get their knowledge primarily from external labs and feeds.
Detecting intrusions relies on models and patterns of what something good looks like (typically built by baselining normal behavior) and looking for deviations/anomalies. These systems get their knowledge primarily by observing your own networks and systems in use.
These are quite different, and not every vendor does both well. Could a well-designed product do both? Sure. For example, some of the IPS vendors can consume and process Netflow data to build baselines of normal traffic patterns in their offerings.
Don’t assume that putting a network or host-based IPS into “detect” mode gives you IDS, Sure, it’s “detecting intrusions”, but using the same techniques the IPS engine uses based on external-facing knowledge, not internal. It’s not helping you understand if you’ve already been compromised by a targeted attack that the labs aren’t aware of yet. Despite calling it IDS, you’ve still only got half of the prevention + detection equation.
These are fundamentally different problems.
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Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Information Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Beyond Anti-Virus, Defense-in-Depth, Endpoint Protection Platform, Information Security, Next-generation Security Infrastructure
