Sunnyvale, California-based AlienVault has brought in a new management team to help drive the next stage of its growth. The company has announced Barmak Meftah as the new president and chief executive officer, and Roger Thornton as chief technology officer. Meftah previously served as chief products officer at Fortify Software. Thornton incubated and founded Fortify at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, serving as its chief technology officer and on the board of directors. Julio Casal, AlienVault cofounder and the former CEO, will serve as general manager of the new MSSP business unit, and Dominique Karg, AlienVault cofounder and the former CTO, will lead the OSSIM community as chief hacking officer.

As we detailed in our April long-format report The Cyber-Security Playbook, the greater intrusion sector is composed of two iterations of intrusion-detection system (IDS) technology, built with two distinct threat paths in mind – the network and the host – referred to as network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) and host intrusion detection systems (HIDS), respectively.

IDS technologies have been around since the early 1980s, and were invented to detect anomalous behavior and misuse from a network-centric perspective. These software applications were traditionally deployed to detect external network-traversing threats in a similar fashion to the way airborne warning and control systems and radar arrays were leveraged to provide early warning of conventional military attacks. IDS technologies were born out of a need to provide the same early-warning indicators as traditional defensive technologies, but spread atop a relatively new and somewhat indefensible technological battlefield.

When most people speak of ‘open source intrusion detection,’ however, they immediately think of the venerable Snort IDS project. What most don’t know is that there are several other projects in active development that provide much of the same functionality – and some with even greater features.

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Open source software provides several advantages that can, and should, be leveraged by enterprise security vendors to extend or complement current capabilities, add new features, and perhaps even open new doors in the existing customer base or for prospective customers. As a former engineering manager (and later product and program manager) responsible for driving third-party integration at a security software startup, I have had lots of experience in auditing customer requirements and leading the integration of open source software technologies into a core product. Through my experience, I’ve learned that even if the inclusion of open source software isn’t something that a vendor is currently considering, simply having the option to integrate said capabilities in the future may be an attractive draw. Also, if the vendor does choose to fold open source security technology into the product, the resulting capabilities may help diversify and differentiate said product among its peers. I’ve also learned just how difficult it is to find the required information to properly design the functional specifications document, develop integration and validate the results.

Why might you choose the open source software instead of building organically or buying commercial technology? For one thing, the code is already written and is likely able to be licensed or reused within commercial software – provided the vendor follows the rules of the employed license model. Also, building a comparative product from the ground up might be cost- and resource-prohibitive if the inclusion of the feature is simply considered a differentiator (but not a deal-breaker if it’s not present) by the customer. Finally, the acquisition of a commercial competitor to an open source technology might not allow for the advanced customization and integration required to neatly fold the features and functionality into the core product. Our colleagues explore these concepts, among others, in greater detail within the Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) division of 451 Research.

In these spotlights, we will highlight some important and powerful open source security tools to better educate readers and, perhaps, spark some additional interest for use in future integration roadmap conversations. In addition to discussing the product capabilities, we will identify existing integration methods and even some suggestions for future augmentations to the open source code base. Some of the technology sectors that will be explored include intrusion detection and prevention, asset management, forensics and incident response, SIEM and log management, threat intelligence, vulnerability assessment and management, penetration testing, and packet capture and deep packet inspection.