Snort vs. Proofpoint Advanced Threat Protection

If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.

Incentivized

It is great out of the box and uses AI and machine learning to identify threats with minimal input. It does need to be configured and tuned to meet the needs of the organisation. Industry specific software that sends or receives emails may be affected by this product.

Incentivized

• IPS detection.
• DoS detection.
• Packet logging.

Incentivized

• Spam filtering.
• Automatic retrieval of malicious emails that have gotten through the filter but were later detected using sample data across all the organizations Proofpoint has as customers.

Incentivized

• At times can be unstable with Cisco bugs, require frequent upgrading.
• FTD images that are being pushed for ASAs are less efficient from an administration standpoint, no CLI.

Incentivized

• With our current setup we need to add new users manually.
• Reports aren't that intuitive.
• Mailboxes have to be removed manually.

Incentivized

Proofpoint offers a lot of products, but they are not particularly well integrated. They all look different, and there is no central location to access them all from, which is disappointing. However, I do know they have a big push for upgrading the UI and usability, so this should improve in the coming months I hope.

Incentivized

Even though the product is good, the support can be lacking at times. The support needs to know their product inside and out, but there are times in which we figure out things before their support does. I feel as if we should not be able to fix issues that their support cant fix, hence the main reason for support.

Incentivized

For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a Barracuda Web Filter, but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.

Incentivized

Proofpoint's Advanced Threat Protection, in the past, has identified threats whereby Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection did not.

Incentivized

• Being open source, ROI on free is hard to beat for something that works.
• I believe it greatly enhances the security of my network.

• PP blocks 5-10 emails per day which are spam or malicious
• I only get a small number of emails per week which are spam
• The only malicious emails I receive are from our internal security team which bypasses the PP threat protection

Incentivized