Snort Sniffs Out a Commercial Future
Source: SecurityFocus
The creator of the popular open source intrusion detection system gets megabucks in venture capital for a
Snort start-up.
The commercial potential of open source security products won a financial vote of confidence last week when the
author of the hacker-busting freeware program Snort pulled in $2 million in venture capital, and moved his year-old
start-up company out of his suburban Maryland living room.
Martin Roesch wrote Snort as a lightweight intrusion detection system in his spare time in 1998. The program quickly
became hugely popular: one vendor estimates there are 100,000 Snort installations worldwide, and the project's official
Web site boasted nearly 10 million downloads in it's first year of operation. The software's been ported to nearly every
operating system platform, and the documentation translated into at least seven different languages.
