Sguil (pronounced sgweel) is probably best described as an aggregation system for network security monitoring tools. It ties your IDS alerts into a database of TCP/IP sessions, full content packet logs and other information. When you’ve identified an alert that needs more investigation, the sguil client provides you with seamless access to the data you need to decide how to handle the situation. In other words, sguil simply ties together the outputs of various security monitoring tools into a single interface, providing you with the most information in the shortest amount of time.
Sguil uses a database backend for most of its data, which allows you to perform SQL queries against several different types of security events.
How is sguil different from Snort + ACID or Snort + BASE?
ACID & BASE are both web-based IDS alert management systems. They let you browse and search alerts, but don’t offer very much in the way of data-mining that would allow you to answer questions like, “Was this an attack attempt or a false positive?”, “Was the attempt successful?” or “What other machines did the attacker try to crack once he got into this one?”. They rely on you to do the research necessary to determine the severity of the situation.
Sguil’s design centers on providing convenient, quick access to a host of supporting information, which both saves you time and helps you make better decisions. Incidentally, because sguil uses a dedicated client instead of running through a web browser, you get a richer, more responsive user interface as well.
You can find snort here:
You can read more and download Sguil here:
