This all new book covering the brand new Snort version 2.6 from members of the Snort developers team.The book will begin with a discussion of packet inspection and the progression from intrusion detection to intrusion prevention. The authors provide examples of packet inspection methods including: protocol standards compliance, protocol anomaly detection, application control, and signature matching. In addition, application-level vulnerabilities including Binary Code in HTTP headers, HTTP/HTTPS Tunneling, URL Directory Traversal, Cross-Site Scripting, and SQL Injection will also be analyzed. Next, a brief chapter on installing and configuring Snort will highlight various methods for fine tuning your installation to optimize Snort performance including hardware/OS selection, finding and eliminating bottlenecks, and benchmarking and testing your deployment. A special chapter also details how to use Barnyard to improve the overall performance of Snort. Next, best practices will be presented allowing readers to enhance the performance of Snort for even the largest and most complex networks. The next chapter reveals the inner workings of Snort by analyzing the source code. The next several chapters will detail how to write, modify, and fine-tune basic to advanced rules and pre-processors.The last part of the book contains several chapters on active response, intrusion prevention, and using Snort's most advanced capabilities for everything from forensics and incident handling to building and analyzing honey pots.