The 4 th International Symposium on Sustainable Development (ISSD2013) SOC-1441 1 OPEN SOURCE INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM USING SNORT Ibrahim Kinal, Kemal Hajdarevic International Burch University, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, 71000, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Email: ikinal@ibu.edu.ba , khajdarevic@ibu.edu.ba ABSTRACT Software and hardware components are parts of almost every Intrusion Detection System (IDS) which is able to monitor computer networks for any possible security incidents. Using Internet resources all over the world has been becoming as one of the most popular task among all people and this usage and connection to Internet creates security risk for many different network attacks. This is because these attacks and threats can strongly affects network security. IDS system became one of the most useful network security mechansinms which protect users`s valuable resources and confidentialy, integrity and availability of information and information assets located in the protected part of any organization’s computer network. Therefore, IDS systems have a very significant role in protecting users, companies or any institutions againist cyber attacks. IDS can be designed as signature-based or anomaly-based detection system. Signature-based system (Misuse-based IDS) is only eligible to detect attacks which are already known and anomaly-based systems are eligible to detect unknown attacks which give them functionality to be proactive i.e. to resolve attack before it harm specific protected system. In this paper are presented already available classification of IDS and general capabilities of SNORT open source IDS solution. Keywords: Snort, IDS, Intrusion Detection System, Intrusion, Signature-based IDS, Anomaly- based IDS, 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays security is one of the biggest issues for almost all networks in any field. There are countless malicious attempts to reach to companies’ private information, networks and web services therefore many different methods have been used by different companies to provide