If you haven’t heard of Community SANS courses before, I encourage you to have a look at this new format (new outside the US, where it’s been running for years). This is a great way of bringing the popular SANS courses to your local security community at a reasonable cost, especially for those that can’t attend the major events.  It’s worth mentioning that unlike the SANS Mentor  sessions, these are delivered over a six-day period, just like it is at a larger SANS event, including the full set of books and access to audio files. They are just delivered in your own community, in a small classroom setting and at a discounted cost for tuition and travel expenses.

I’ve already described my experience with SANS, both as student and facilitator, so I won’t go over that again. Also, you can find a further detailed description of the Security 503 track on SANS website, an outstanding course that I’ve already described as the “most valuable course I’ve ever taken”. However, I want you to listen to Mike Poor, instructor at the SANS Institute and co-author of this course (along with Judy Novak and Guy Bruneau), describing it on YouTube. Mike Poor is both an amazing professional and a great guy that I had the opportunity to meet at SANS Sydney in 2008, when I took his Penetration Testing class. As Mike would say, this IDS course is simply “awesome”!

You can download it from the following location:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/security-onion/

The following information is extracted from Doug’s Security Onion blog:

What is it?

The Security Onion LiveCD is a bootable CD that contains software used for installing, configuring, and testing Intrusion Detection Systems.

What software does it contain?

The Security Onion LiveCD is based on Xubuntu 9.04 and contains Snort 2.8.4.1, Snort 3.0.0b3 (Beta), sguil, idswakeup, nmap, metasploit, scapy, hping, fragroute, fragrouter, netcat, paketto, tcpreplay, and many other security tools.

What can it be used for?

-The Security Onion LiveCD can be used for Intrusion Detection. Simply boot the CD and double-click either the Snort-Sguil or SnortSP-Sguil desktop shortcuts. The Snort and Sguil daemons will then start, listening on eth0 for any suspicious traffic and creating alerts in the Sguil console.

-The Security Onion LiveCD can be used to test an Intrusion Detection System. Simply boot the CD and use the included tools (such as nmap, metasploit, idswakeup, scapy, hping, and others) to test your existing IDS or to test the included Snort 2.8.4.1 and Snort 3.0 Beta 3.

-The Security Onion LiveCD can be used to install an Intrusion Detection System. Simply boot the CD and double-click the Install desktop shortcut. For more information about installation, please see the README desktop shortcut.

I haven’t had a chance to download it yet, but I will definitely give it a try over the next few days. I’m very interested in trying out the IDS installation feature and see how it compares to other Sguil installation scripts like NSMnow. I’m currently working on the deployment of a good number of Sguil servers/sensors and NSMnow has reduced significantly the time needed to get them up and running. Hence, any new development on this topic is more than welcome.

I will keep posting my findings on this new exciting tool!