Snort in FBI, Pentagon, wrangle
p2p news / p2pnet: The last time we came across Snort, it was part of a Big Four record labels exercise when Spain’s Guardia Civil police force was being used as a corporate music industry weapon against “unauthorised” music and movie sharing through university networks in Spain and abroad.
Now an Israeli company has been told it faces a, “rare, full-blown investigation over its plans to buy a smaller rival,” namely, Snort, says the Washington Post.
“Someone – possibly the record labels’ AFYVE (Asociación Fonográfica y Videográfica de España) – supposedly used Snort, an open source network intrusion detection system, to dig out addresses,” p2pnet posted more than two years ago.
Was Snort being used in other Hollywood-slash-Big Music-instigated ‘investigations’ elsewhere? – we asked Snort’s Martin Roesch at the time.
“I didn’t know about the Spanish operation or any other governmental/industry use of the system to perform these kinds of functions, but it’s something that Snort is certainly capable of,” he told p2pnet. However, “beyond collecting flow statistics Snort can’t really see inside encrypted traffic sessions at all,” he said.
Otherwise, Snort was, “meant to be a flexible traffic analysis tool that can be put to use for any network analysis task,” he went on. “The rules language is certainly flexible enough to be used to search for p2p traffic protocols and do logging of sessions for extended periods of time. Additionally, Snort supports extensible interfaces so that users can add their own protocol analysis modules or any other complex analysis code to the system.”
In October, 2005, “I am very excited to announce that Check Point has signed an agreement to acquire Sourcefire, the company that develops the Snort project and maintains the snort.org domain,” Roesch posted.
But according to the Washington Post, “The company was told U.S. officials feared the transaction could endanger some of government’s most sensitive computer systems. The objections by the FBI and Pentagon were partly over specialized intrusion detection software known as ‘Snort,’ which guards some classified U.S. military and intelligence computers.”
Officials from the FBI and Defense Department, “objected forcefully to permitting any foreign company to acquire some sensitive Sourcefire technology for preventing hacker break-ins and monitoring data traffic, an executive familiar with the discussions told The Associated Press,” says the Washington Post.
“This executive spoke on condition of anonymity because government negotiations are supposed to remain confidential.”
Check Point would own all Sourcefire’s patents, source-code blueprints for its software and the expertise of employees, it states.
Also See:
music industry weapon – 14 nabbed in Spanish music bust, Februaryy 11
Washington Post – Israeli Software Company Faces U.S. Probe, March 2, 2006
March 4th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
This is a sad joke and a slap in the face to the American public.
The lame bastards (in this instance, gov’t) care about an outside company buying another where their sourcecode (for snort anyway) is already publicly available but yet the ports of America can be bought and controlled by a non-American owner and even our President doesnt know about it happening?
Something seems wrong with the value system there I think.
Just my 10 cents.
_-Jile-_
March 6th, 2006 at 9:37 am
“Something seems wrong with the value system there I think.”
Sure, everything, the legislators, the politicians, the judges, the bureaucracy, etc. can be purchased with money. Everything is for sale.
Here is my guess: Check Point did not grease some bureaucrat. Maybe they are honest and honesty leads nowhere in bushland.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com