StillSecure offers free intrustion-detection system

Enterprise security company StillSecure is offering a fully supported free version of its Strata Guard intrusion-detection and -prevention system (IDS/IPS) for use with remote office connections, and to home users and small organizations.

Based on the widely used open-source Snort IDS/IPS engine, Strata Guard Free can monitor data streams of as fast as 5 megabits/second. It includes the same Web-based management console provided with StillSecure's other Strata Guard products and is updated with attack rules written by the company's attack alert team as they become available.

Offering Strata Guard Free is a way of giving back to the community that helped develop open-source products such as Snort, and it will also open the market for IPS, said Mitchell Ashley, StillSecure's chief technology officer and vice president of customer experience.

"Full-featured IPS is usually pricey and that's a high barrier for smaller organizations," he said. "And while you can now get some IPS features embedded in firewalls, they tend to be very limited products that only look for a relatively small number of attacks.”

However, he said, IPS is regularly in the top five of the company's budgeted items for 2006, so the demand is evident.

Many Snort users can expect a similar product with which to upgrade, Ashley said, so StillSecure is expecting a ready market for its free product. The payoff for the company will come as smaller organizations decide to upgrade to enterprise versions of Strata Guard, he said.