Cisco to aquire Sourcefire

Cisco has just announced the acquisition of Sourcefire, a company that creates cybersecurity products to protect companies from attacks. The purchase price is $2.7 billion, or $76 per share in cash plus retention-based incentives.

Source:
Cisco Bolsters Security Strategy with Agreement to Acquire Sourcefire

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the_Grinch

Ah sad really, but I knew this was going to happen. They use to have the best job postings ever, stuff to the effect of "must be able to debate who shot first Han or Greedo, must have seen True Lies at least twice and be able to quote it, good at beer pong". But the last two years the postings became very formal.

veritas_libertas

I'm curious to see what this means for Snort and ClamAV.

chaser7783

Yes, i'm curious to see what happens with snort and VRT.

Master Of Puppets

veritas_libertas wrote: »

I'm curious to see what this means for Snort and ClamAV.

That was my first thought. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

veritas_libertas

Sourcefire’s open source model is expected to strengthen and accelerate Cisco’s ability to build a strong ecosystem of security partners who can bring real time threat intelligence and innovations to customers through integration with our technologies and platforms.

Security is a critical component to Cisco’s overall strategy to be the No. 1 IT company. Earlier this year, we acquired Cognitive Security, a security software company that applies artificial intelligence techniques to detect advanced cyber threats. Cognitive Security and Sourcefire are expected to help Cisco achieve our goal as we offer more best-in-class security services; more intelligence sources for continuous protection; and an open platform to enable a threat-aware network.

We believe that Cisco and Sourcefire customers will benefit from the combination of world-class products and technologies to provide continuous and pervasive advanced threat protection across the entire attack continuum and from any device to any cloud.

@Master of the Puppets: This part makes me hopeful. As you said, we are forced to wait and see.

dover

Ah man, DAMMIT! Tell me it ain't so Marty (Roesch)....

Well if anyone deserves a sweet payday I'd vote for Marty - have loved Snort since the first time I (painstakingly) got it running.

Nyblizzard

chaser7783 wrote: »

Cisco has just announced the acquisition of Sourcefire, a company that creates cybersecurity products to protect companies from attacks. The purchase price is $2.7 billion, or $76 per share in cash plus retention-based incentives.

Source:
Cisco Bolsters Security Strategy with Agreement to Acquire Sourcefire

Any other examples?

docrice

You can look at these, although they don't really say much either:

http://blog.snort.org/2013/07/a-continued-commitment-to-open-source.html

http://blog.sourcefire.com/Post/2013/07/23/1374581400-cisco--sourcefire--now-bigger-stronger-faster/

My main concern is whether Snort will be actively developed as it is today (or better) and maintained as an open source project. Otherwise, there's still Suricata.

chaser7783

It appears Snort will stay opensource. Which is a relief because at my company we have over 2k+ IDS that utilize snort.

Then there's that pig -- open-source Snort, that is -- in the room. While Cisco has not traditionally been associated with the open-source community, Snort will change all of that. "Snort brings a vibrant, open-source community to Cisco," Cisco's Young says. "That was an important attribute that attracted us to Sourcefire ... Together we will have a continued partnership with the open-source community."

Cisco Banks On Sourcefire And Snort For Its Security Future -- Dark

Priston

Between OpenDaylight, Snort, and OpenStack I think we will start seeing Cisco contribute more to the open source community.

dover

I think Snort will stick around (and be relevant), but I don't think it'll see the same level of support/dedication it has had from user and community development effort - in the long term.

As for the Sourcefire products I would just hate to see the Cisco proprietary 'black-box door' close on the ability to customize settings and sigs. That and I'm afraid we'll start seeing some bizarre signature subscriptions trying to 'leverage' customers into paying Cisco rates for sigs, support, etc.. My mind immediately went to worst case scenario: individual sig subscriptions for specific protocols (IP,TCP,UDP,BGP, etc) or device/user/connection based subscription levels.

I hope I'm wrong and they run with SF instead of trying to assimilate SF features into current Cisco IPS 7 code. It would be awesome to see a SF virtual appliance running on a blade or as an add-in module for ASA-X or 6500s.

WafflesAndRootbeer

Priston wrote: »

Between OpenDaylight, Snort, and OpenStack I think we will start seeing Cisco contribute more to the open source community.

Cisco already contributes heavily to the Open Source software community. This will just add a few more things to the table if they intend to continue open development of these projects, especially if they can optimize their hardware to work with these software solutions.