From the course: Protecting Your Network with Open-Source Software

Open-source solutions in cybersecurity

From the course: Protecting Your Network with Open-Source Software

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Open-source solutions in cybersecurity

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- [Instructor] Many cybersecurity solutions are open source and free. Hence, this course makes perfect sense and gets to exist. Good for us. The cybersecurity domains I cover include firewalls, packet and protocol analysis, intrusion detection and prevention, or IDS and IPS, vulnerability assessment, logging and monitoring. iptables is what Linux uses to control the flow of data packets in and out of a host or network. Any firewall implementations in Linux pretty much builds on iptables. Knowing iptables is like unlocking the secret code of controlling network packets in general. Wireshark is one of the most popular packet snipers and allows you to intercept packets and inspect them. Many organizations use Wireshark to troubleshoot networking problems, test software, and develop protocols. I recommend Snort as a great tool to start with when considering an IDS or IPS solution. Snort is versatile and can take on packet sniffing, IDS and IPS tasks, depending on your needs. Nessus is a vulnerability management system, or VMS. It comes through systems throughout a network and identifies weaknesses, such as zero-day vulnerabilities. For those of you unfamiliar with the term zero-day, it means a security vulnerability whose fix is not available yet and susceptible to attacks. syslog and syslog-ng are a mainstream way of handling, logging, and monitoring. Networking hardware and software generate log files, which in turn enables engineers to monitor their health and look for any signs of intrusion. There are many software options and solutions other than what I'm covering in this course, but you'll get a good feel for what's available in general by following me along with the lessons. Once you get a decent understanding of what these tools can do in cybersecurity, migrating to other similar software applications won't be a problem. We are lucky that there's so many choices at our fingertips, and I want you to take full advantage of these opportunities by exploring them with me.

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