Description:

Snort is an open source network intrusion detection system, capable of
performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP
networks. It can perform protocol analysis and content
searching/matching in order to detect a variety of attacks and probes,
such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes,
OS fingerprinting attempts, and much more. Snort uses a flexible rules
language to describe traffic that it should collect or pass, as well
as a detection engine that utilizes a modular plugin architecture.
Snort has a real- time alerting capability as well, incorporating
alerting mechanisms for syslog, user specified files, a UNIX socket,
or WinPopup messages to Windows clients using Samba's smbclient.