Securing Cisco Networks with Snort Rule Writing Best Practices

Course details

Overview:

Securing Cisco Networks with Snort Rule Writing Best Practices is a lab-intensive course that introduces students to the open source Snort community and rule-writing best practices.Users focus exclusively on the Snort rules language and rule writing. Starting from rule syntax and structure to advanced rule-option usage, you will analyze exploit packet captures and put the rule writing theories learned to work—implementing rule-language features to trigger alerts on the offending network traffic.This course also provides instruction and lab exercises on how to detect certain types of attacks, such as buffer overflows, utilizing various rule-writing techniques. You will test your rule-writing skills in two challenges: a theoretical challenge that tests knowledge of rule syntax and usage, and a practical challenge in which we present an exploit for you to analyze and research so you can defend your installations against the attack.This course combines lecture materials and hands-on labs throughout to make sure that you are able to successfully understand and implement open source rules.

Objectives:

After completing this course, you should be able to:

• Understand rule structure, rule syntax, rule options, and their usage
• Configure and create Snort rules
• Understand the rule optimization process to create efficient rules
• Understand preprocessors and how data is presented to the rule engine
• Create and implement functional Regular Expressions in Snort rules
• Design and apply rules using byte_jump/test/extract rule options
• Understand the concepts behind protocol modeling to write rules that perform better

Content:

• Module 1: Welcome to the Sourcefire Virtual Network
• Module 2: Basic Rule Syntax and Usage
• Module 3: Rule Optimization
• Module 4: Using PCRE in Rules
• Module 5: Using Byte_Jump/Test/Extract Rule Options
• Module 6: Protocol Modeling Concepts and Using Flowbits in Rule Writing
• Module 7: Case Sudies in Rule Writing and Packet Analysis
• Module 8: Rule Performance Monitoring
• Module 9: Rule Writing Practiceal Labs, Exercises, and Challenges
• Labs