IDS has failed to impress the market, Martin Roesch told delegates at the AusCERT computer security conference in Queensland. The inability of many to "tune" an IDS -- minimising the number of false alarms triggered by the monitoring devices -- has been a major draw-back for the widespread acceptance of the technology, he said.

The next generation of Snort will include "passive discovery" features, Roesch said, which will automatically tweak the package's settings.

"IDS is not working as well as had been hoped, or as well as had been hyped," he said. "People have been saying... IDS can be used to secure your network. But that's not the role of an IDS."

By Patrick Gray at ZDNet.

[ Read more ]

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