Who is Rafeeq Ur Rehman? Introduce yourself to our readers.

I am working as Managing Consultant at Dedicated Technologies Inc. where we provide services related to enterprise security and IT management. In my spare time, I also work on open source and free software projects with my friends at Argus Network Security Services. We have made a free version of Snort based EasyIDS for Linux as a community service. I have bachelor and masters degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology Lahore. I have authored four books, two of these are under Bruce Perens' Open Source Series. This series is aimed at creating open books which are feely downloadable and modifiable. I believe that this is an excellent community service to promote open source software.

How did you get interested in computer security?

It started with my Masters Degree thesis where I had to test efficiency of some firewall products. Since then I have been working with security products one way or the other. The computing and networking infrastructure is a universal asset and all of us are benefiting from the ubiquitous computing resources available all over the world. I think working for security of this infrastructure is more than a job and is very important for business as well as future of computing community itself. Best of all, it provides new challenges every day and I love it.

Do you have any favorite security tools?


My favorite tools are Nessus and nmap. These are great tools for assessment of security of your networks and to plug holes that may be exploited by hackers. Other than these two tools, my best security friend is Ethereal which is an excellent protocol analyzer.

How long did it take you to write "Intrusion Detection with SNORT: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID" and what was it like?

It took about 10 months to write and publish the book. This is published under Bruce Perens' Open Source series. This was one of the first initiatives to publish documentation on Snort in the form of a book and I am glad it worked well.

In your opinion, what are the most important things an administrator has to do in order to keep a network secure?