CrossTec Media Center

New Activeworx SMC Effectively Manages and Monitors Snort® events

SMC provides cost effective IDS tools to focus on identifying and responding to threats.

BOCA RATON, Fla. ( January 29, 2007) – CrossTec Corporation (www.crosstecsecurity.com) has released Activeworx SMC -- a low cost, user friendly, solution for managing and monitoring Snort® IDS events and keeping Snort policies and rules up-to-date on sensors. With a combination of easy to understand graphs, charts, and event diagrams, and the ability to look at packet headers and payload data, Activeworx SMC provides vital tools necessary for an IDS administrator to focus on what’s important: quickly identifying and responding to interesting events.

Snort® IDS has become the most widely deployed intrusion detection technology worldwide. While most of the management tools available are limited, expensive, or difficult to use, Activeworx has introduced the new Snort Management Center (SMC), based on the full-blown security information and event management (SIEM) solution, Activeworx Security Center (ASC). Activeworx SMC is priced from $395 per sensor.

According to Jeff Richards, Vice President of CrossTec’s Security Division, “Activeworx SMC offers an affordable solution that provides unprecedented features for managing Snort® IDS events, such as customizable dashboards, detailed IDS reporting, interactive graphs, and event relationship diagrams.” Activeworx SMC also boasts complete IDS policy management including Snort policy updates, and it gives you the ability to push new Snort policies to sensors from a central location plus numerous ways to view, analyze, and manage snort events.

Activeworx SMC integrates tightly with the Snort® IDS event database to provide high valued information from existing Snort® IDS installations, without modifying the original database schema. Activeworx SMC includes Activeworx IDS Policy Manager V2, which has been the de facto standard for managing Snort policies on Windows since its initial release in 2000. According to Richards, “Whether it’s a new Snort installation, or one that has been in place for years, there has never been a more effective, less intrusive, and less expensive centralized management console for Snort.”

The integration of IDS Policy Manager into a Snort Event Management solution not only provides the ability to view, correlate, and report on Snort events, but it adds seamless IDS rule management and deployment. Administrators now have the ability to quickly view, disable or set suppression for a single rule on a single sensor, or to deploy a rule change to all Snort sensors, while viewing information about an event that is currently triggering, all within the same console view. IDS Policy Manager adds easy updates and deployment of Snort rules to the familiar Activeworx event management interface for more proactive management of all Snort® IDS installations.

About CrossTec
CrossTec Corporation, founded in 1996, specializes in providing cost-effective, high quality, management software solutions for IT Security, Help Desks and Educational Technology. Based in Boca Raton, Fla., CrossTec and its certified partners, provide personalized consulting and support to corporations, organizations, government agencies and educational institutions. CrossTec offers no-charge, toll-free, pre- and post-sale technical support, offering one-on-one, professional assistance from certified technical engineers.

Contact:
Doug Taylor
CrossTec Corporation
pr@crosstecsoftware.com

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