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Saving Our Bacon: Snort Security Holes and Strategies for Safe Network Monitoring

In April, a CERT advisory announced the discovery of two separate buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in Snort, a popular security-monitoring tool used for detecting suspicious network activities. This development was disturbing and ironic: system administrators install and run programs like Snort to improve security, and don't often consider the possibility that the tools themselves might be attacked and exploited to create entirely new security holes. It's therefore important to understand precisely what happened here, especially since the same mechanisms used against Snort could threaten other security tools.