Choosing which intrusion detection system (IDS) is hard enough, but it gets even more difficult when choosing over simple configuration decisions. Most intrusion detection systems in cyber security give users the option to make various choices about their set-up, and for some IDS options, the resulting choices can be vastly different. This blog post seeks to weigh the pros and cons of intrusion detection and intrusion prevention systems, as well as network-based and host-based IDS, to help readers make more informed decisions when configuring their IDS tools.
What are the advantages of intrusion detection systems?
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) offer several advantages in the fight against cyber threats. Some benefits of intrusion detection systems include:
- Early Threat Detection: IDS continuously monitor network traffic or system activity, allowing them to detect suspicious behavior in real-time. This provides earlier warning signs of potential attacks compared to simply waiting for negative consequences.
- Improved Incident Response: By identifying suspicious activity, IDS can help security personnel prioritize and respond to incidents more quickly and effectively. The information provided by IDS alerts can be crucial for investigating the nature and scope of the potential attack.
- Security Visibility: IDS offer valuable insights into network traffic and system activity. This can help security teams better understand potential vulnerabilities within their systems and identify areas where they might need to strengthen their defenses.
- Compliance Support: Many regulations and compliance standards require organizations to have intrusion detection capabilities in place. Implementing IDS can help organizations meet these compliance requirements.
- Reduced Risk of Data Breaches: By detecting and alerting on suspicious activity, IDS can help prevent attackers from gaining access to sensitive data or compromising systems. This can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches and associated costs.
- Security Awareness: Even basic IDS can raise awareness of security issues within an organization. Alerts and reports generated by IDS can highlight potential security risks and encourage a more security-conscious culture.
What are the disadvantages of intrusion detection and prevention systems?
Some of the main challenges of intrusion detection systems include:
False Positives and False Negatives:
- False positives occur when the system mistakenly flags normal activity as suspicious, wasting time and resources for security personnel investigating these non-threats.
- False negatives happen when the IDS/IPS fails to detect actual malicious activity, potentially leaving your system vulnerable. Factors like outdated signatures, misconfigured rules, or novel attack techniques can contribute to both issues.
Limited Visibility:
- Network-based IDS (NIDS) primarily focus on network traffic analysis and might miss threats that don't involve network activity. Additionally, encrypted traffic can be difficult for NIDS to analyze, potentially allowing malicious activity to slip through undetected. Host-based IDS (HIDS) can provide better visibility into individual devices, but they can't offer a holistic view of the entire network.
Resource Consumption:
- Running IDS/IPS can consume significant computing resources, depending on the type of system, volume of network traffic, or system activity it needs to analyze. This can be a concern for organizations with limited resources.
Evolving Threats:
- Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, and attackers are always developing new techniques to bypass detection methods. IDS/IPS rely on signatures or baselines to identify threats, and they may struggle to detect novel attacks that haven't been defined yet. Keeping IDS/IPS signatures and configurations up-to-date is critical for maintaining effectiveness.
Alert Fatigue:
- A constant stream of IDS/IPS alerts, even if some are false positives, can overwhelm security personnel. This can lead to alert fatigue, where they become desensitized to alerts and miss important ones.
Insider Threats:
- IDS/IPS are primarily focused on detecting external threats and may not be effective in identifying malicious activity by authorized users within the network (insider threats). These threats require additional security measures like user activity monitoring and access controls.
Additional Considerations:
- Complexity: Configuring and managing IDS/IPS can be complex, requiring specialized knowledge and skills.
- Cost: Depending on the chosen solution, licensing and maintenance costs for IDS/IPS can be significant.
- Performance Impact: In some cases, IDS/IPS can introduce latency or slow down network performance, especially with resource-intensive configurations.
What is the main advantage of IPS over IDS?
The main advantage of Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) over Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is their ability to actively block and prevent threats from entering your network or system, while IDS only detect and alert suspicious activity. This comes with its own challenges, however. Intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems are known for their false positives. In an IDS, this is not usually a big issue. A false positive just means more “noise” for the analyst to search through. For an IPS, though, a false positive will result in legitimate traffic getting blocked because it resembles something potentially malicious. For some organizations, this could result in a loss of business, upset website visitors, or decreased productivity. For this reason, many organizations choose to use an IDS and a Firewall rather than an IPS to both monitor and block traffic.
What are the advantages of NIDS over HIDS?
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) offer several advantages over Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) in securing your network:
- Broader Network Visibility: NIDS monitors all network traffic traversing a specific network segment, providing a wider view of potential threats across your entire network infrastructure. This allows you to identify and address attacks targeting any device on the network, not just individual endpoints.
- Centralized Deployment and Management: NIDS can be deployed on a central network device like a firewall or a dedicated sensor, simplifying deployment and management compared to HIDS which requires installation on each individual device. This can save time and resources, especially for large networks with numerous endpoints.
- Detection of Network-Based Threats: NIDS excels at detecting threats that exploit network vulnerabilities or involve communication across the network. This includes attacks like denial-of-service (DoS), port scanning, or malware propagation attempts that primarily leverage network traffic.
- Reduced Resource Consumption: While some NIDS implementations can be resource-intensive, they generally require less overhead compared to HIDS which needs to run on each individual endpoint device. This can be beneficial for resource-constrained environments.
- Scalability: NIDS scales well to accommodate growing network traffic volumes. By strategically placing NIDS sensors, you can monitor network traffic across various segments without significantly impacting performance.
Explore a modern alternative
IDS is undoubtedly a powerful and effective means to detect known threats on your organization’s network. Unfortunately, most IDS deployments are riddled with false positives, provide limited threat detection, and lack sufficient visibility into anomalous activity and subtle attack signals. Traditional IDS vendors have failed to innovate in ways that solve these challenges, leading to inefficient or downright ineffective threat detection.
You need a network security platform that doesn’t generate an endless stream of useless alerts across part of your network, and instead automatically identifies alerts of interest and notifies you of only serious and imminent threats. Your organization deserves response-ready detection with visibility into your entire network regardless of the environment with easy access to all the contextual evidence you need to stop an attack before it can cause damage. Replace your legacy IDS with a modern network detection and response platform that gives you these features and more.
The Stamus Security Platform™ is a network-based threat detection and response solution that eliminates the challenges of legacy IDS while lowering your response time. Stamus Security Platform harnesses the full potential of your network, bringing state-of-the-art threat detection, automated event triage, and unparalleled visibility to the security team.
Book a demo to see if the Stamus Security Platform is right for your organization.