Debian should update their Snort package

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 12:37:13 +0000

Last week there was some discussion in the #snort IRC channel about why Debian distributes such an ancient version of Snort, namely version 2.3.3. This release is more than 2 years old and no longer supported by SourceFire. The snort.org website says about the old versions:

You should not use these unless you really know what you are doing. Many bugs may have been fixed, including remote vulnerabilities

Even though Debian is able to fix any security bugs themselves, and they don’t need to rely on SourceFire for this, Snort 2.3.3 is still going to be inferior to the recent 2.6.1.5. Why? Well recent Snort versions have many more and improved detection options, such as a better pattern matcher, defragmentation preprocessor, improved stream preprocessor, smtp plugin, etc, etc.

Sigs on Inliniac

Debian should update their Snort package