
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS), for the most part, involve very expensive network appliances that sit outside the network to prevent attacks from getting in. We call that “hard IPS”. A typical IPS could cost at least $10,000 or more plus maintenance fees.
Soft IPS is software that uses off-the-shelf hardware to monitor network traffic at high-performance speeds in passive or inline mode, block unwanted traffic through packet filtering, TCP session disruption and customizable inline drop policies.
The MetaFlows Security System (MSS) is the very first soft IPS and costs a fraction of what typical a IPS might cost because it doesn’t need an expensive piece of hardware to run.
MetaFlows has modified a piece of open-source software, called PF_RING, so that it can turn a standard off-the-shelf desktop computer into a high-performance intrusion prevention system. If you’d like to learn exactly how our modified version of PF_RING does that, you can read our technical release here.
Soft IPS lets small and medium-sized businesses get the protection they need by lowering the cost of a high-performance IPS. For large enterprises and government agencies, this means that they can drastically reduce their information security and IT costs.
If you’re interested in integrating our modified PF_RING into your own Snort IPS system, you can download our code and install instructions here: MetaFlows Modified PF_RING.