If you are looking for a customizable commuter that doubles as a tough weekender, reach for the Tuck Laptop Backpack. Whether it is really worth that amount of money is of course debatable but what we can say is that this is by far the most comfortable hiking backpack that we have ever tried - it feels absolutely amazing. This report is, to say the least, difficult for a human analyst to read (especially with all the empty fields that are represented by double quotes). Some mention that it's slim and its size of 3"x4" allows it to do so, while others say that it adds bulk to the wallet and is too thick and stiff. The heavily studied hypothesis is that spores were an adaptation of early land plant species, such as embryophytes, that allowed for plants to easily disperse while adapting to their non-aquatic environment. More than just consolidation, though, the present agents 12 provide data normalization, which is of great benefit when an analyst must deal with security incidents in a heterogeneous network environment. Such computer software may be resident in one or more computer readable media, such as hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, read-only memory, read-write memory and so on.

Such software may be distributed on one or more of these media, or may be made available for download across one or more computer networks (e.g., the Internet). In some installations, managers 14 may act as concentrators for multiple agents 12 and can forward information to other managers (e.g., striped sheets deployed at a corporate headquarters). Before presenting those details, however, and to understand why such measures are desirable, some background regarding how analysts currently cope with security event information generated by multiple network devices is useful. Usually, such investigations are launched in response to an alert generated by the IDS. Snort is a well-known IDS and the fields it populates are: exploit or event name, classification, priority, date, time, source IP, source port, target IP, target port, protocol, TTL (time to live), type of service, ID, IP length, datagram length, tcp flags, sequence number, acknowledgement number, window size, and tcp length. For example, in FIG. 1, agent 12a is deployed in connection with an IDS (such as Snort). Snort also reports additional data such as references to investigate the exploit. The final record is a Snort alert that claims this traffic was malicious.

As a first step after receiving such an alert, an analyst might review perimeter router logs to see if a router associated with the network passed a packet that triggered the alert. Accordingly, what is needed is a system that can provide accurate and timely intrusion detection and alert generation so as to effectively combat attempts to compromise a computer network or system. Regardless of whether a host-based or a network-based implementation is adopted and whether that implementation is knowledge-based or behavior-based, an intrusion detection system is only as useful as its ability to discriminate between normal system usage and true intrusions (accompanied by appropriate alerts). If intrusions can be detected and the appropriate personnel naked in more alcohol.