Snort

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What Does Snort Mean?

Snort is an open-source security software product that looks at network traffic in real time and logs packets to perform detailed analysis used to facilitate security and authentication efforts.

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Snort was released by Martin Roesch in 1998.

Techopedia Explains Snort

Snort is useful for developers or others working on different types of system troubleshooting.

The security tool has three different modes, as follows:

  • Packet sniffer
  • Consistent logging of network traffic to facilitate debugging
  • Active network intrusion handling system

Snort is built to detect various types of hacking and uses a flexible rules language to determine the types of network traffic that should be collected.

For Snort to work correctly, users must identify directories for use and perform calibrations to specify how the program should work in any of its three basic modes.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.