The History and Evolution of Snort
Snort has come a long way – from its humble beginnings in the late 1990s to its current position as one of the most popular open source software of all time. Snort was selected into InfoWorld’s Open Source Hall of Fame in 2009. Since then, it has continued to grow and evolve as an open source system and as a network intrusion detection and prevention system. In this chapter, we will discuss how Snort originated and how it evolved into its current form. We will do this by discussing a few of the key releases of Snort and their features.
The main topics covered in this chapter are as follows:
- The beginning of Snort
- Snort 1 – key features and limitations
- Snort 2 – key features, improvements, and limitations
- The need for Snort 3
