December HRSUG Meeting Report

As both of you who read my blog know, last Thursday was the December HRSUG meeting. Jason Brvenik and Jennifer Steffens from Sourcefire attended our inaugural meeting, as did several members of the local security community.

We started out by discussing some organizational matters, and found that everyone was interested in meething on a monthly basis. Until people get to know each other at least a little bit, we've decided to defer electing officers. Nominations will be taken at the January meeting, with an election to be held in February. In the meantine, we can use the mailing list to introduce ourselves.

With introductions and administrative matters out of the way, Jason gave a talk about the advantages of target-based IDS. The idea is that the more you know about your network, the better you can protect it. In the IDS world, this means that you can provide more accurate detection and perhaps boost performance by telling Snort more about the targets (hosts) on your network. Jason discussed the upcoming snort configuration language changes as well as some neat new realtime updating capabilities for loading new configuration into a running snort process. Expect to see these new features rolled out in stages between now and 2007.

Our presentation was followed by an optional "offsite networking event" which was also quite successful.

In short, I think a good time was had by all. Thanks for everyone who showed up, and I'm looking forward to an even better meeting for January! Stay tuned!