U.S. officials investigate Sourcefire purchase

U.S. officials investigate Sourcefire purchase
Kelly Martin, 2006-03-02

U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-02
RJBC (3 replies)

What sense does that make?? Snort is an opensource collaborative effort w/ freely available source. What could checkpoint/Isreal do to hurt us? Seems we have more to fear from the port deal then this one if you REALLY want to stretch them both....

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Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-02
Anonymous (1 replies)

Well, once they own the copyright for Snort, they could take the development closed source. c.f. Nessus.

I don't know that it's likely to happen, but it could....

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Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
AnyColourYouLike (2 replies)

If CP take development of Snort into closed source, surely there is nothing stopping the Open Source community continuing to develop Snort perhaps under a different name, and just plainly ignore CP. Have source will travel.......

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Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous

Exactly my point. Tenable did that with nessus and we all are now supporting openVAS. I think Marty and the gang were smart- very smart - to keep snort open source even w/ sourcefire commercial side. They actually built more support for the company in the business that way.

So, uncle sam just s...

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Re: Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymoose (1 replies)

There's nothing stopping the community from forking Snort should CP decide to change its license model. There wouldnt be a need to go underground or for a forked snort to get Foxed.

My gut tells me that the beaurocracy isn't communicating with the technical arm of the administration....

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Re: Re: Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous

We should ask SourceFire to disclose their "pay for" version of snort which fixes bugs in Stream4Inline (detect multi-packet, fragmented & out of sequence attacks). They have already "fixed" lots of bugs in snort that they have not shared with the open source community.

Why do you think CheckPoi...

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Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous (2 replies)

The only reason that comes to mind is they might have a fear that Isreal might try to put a backdoor or something in Snort to be used against the U.S. government, but then again its open source, anyone can try that. Maybe they don't want snort to be relicensed or something that might hurt military/...

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Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous (2 replies)

Of course no Federal Agency runs any Checkpoint firewalls already...

Do a Federal Security jobs search and look at the number of positions (or TSI required contracting jobs) that require Checkpoint experience.

...

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Re: Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous

Not in the DoD or NSA...

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Re: Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-04
Anonymous

Wrong. Many do. NSA gave CP a clean bill of health a long time ago....

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Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous

CheckPoint did have an "incident" with their Firewall-1 v4.0 where they sent home packets letting CheckPoint know they were online. It was not amusing to many people....

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Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous (1 replies)

It's not the fact of why would they want to hurt us, its the question of can they hurt us if they buy SourceFire, and the answer is yes, they most definately can through snort, which hundreds of US federal systems use, we wouldn't want any risk of having that happen.

I definately think they shoul...

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Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
Anonymous (1 replies)

Israel is an ally....

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Re: Re: Re: U.S. officials investigating Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-04
Anonymous

Is it? Past history shows they look out for themselves and use everyone else. They are the "chosen ones" after all....

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Nothing better to do... 2006-03-03
assurbanipal (2 replies)

So, it's ok to relinquish the management of sea ports, but not the ownership of once-was-opensource firewalls?

I wonder if the militaries evaluated the consequences of adopting open source products in their facilities... did they run code reviews and other form of audits, not to mention threat/risk...

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There's plenty of closed source programs with backdoors and rootkits and unwanted consequences 2006-03-03
jcd

examples, photoshop, Sony audio cd's, scanner software, printing software, and all those companies with password backdoors into your routers, firewalls, etc. ...

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Re: Nothing better to do... 2006-03-03
Anonymous

> I thought software should undergo some form of

> qualification before being considered eligible in

> those environments... apparently I'm too naive I

> guess

What makes you think they dont?...

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U.S. officials investigate Sourcefire purchase 2006-03-03
LaGrandeFoote

anybody google or yahoo ".mil" +checkpoint

seems the firewall is good enough for the mil sites as there are numerous classes offered for checkpoint! Hum, somebodys shorts are too tight, oh well back to the px for new ones....

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