What You Need To Know About Intrusion Detection Systems

Intrusion has been a hook for many movies and web series of the horror and thriller genre. For instance, a 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror – A Quiet Place. It's a wickedly scary movie that shows sightless aliens with sharp hearing have intruded on the planet and killed most of the population. To protect themselves from the intruder aliens, the Abbott family follows a list of precautions – laying sand on paths to avoid stepping on crunching leaves, using sign language while communicating, etc. As the movie unfolds, it surprises audiences with twists and turns!

Do you know, like what we saw in A Quiet Place, even your systems are prone to some intruders? These intrusions are aimed to destroy or steal personal information. Malicious parties obtain access to the internal systems and can steal your data, cause financial loss, corrupt your data or even cause operational disruption.

Unfortunately, in the movie, the Abbott family couldn't stop the intruders from invading the planet - but in reality, you can block such intrusions with the help of Intrusion Detection Systems! These systems monitor the networks or techniques for any insecure activity. The primary objective of these systems is to ensure that the IT team is informed of a possible attack or a network invasion. In short, these systems are the ultimate saviors of your organization!

We're sure you must be curious to know more about Intrusion Detection Systems; head-on, decode these systems in detail.
 

Understanding Intrusion Detection Systems

An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a system that monitors network traffic for malicious activities and alerts when such actions are discovered. Anomaly detection and reporting are the primary functions of an IDS but some of these systems are capable of taking measures while activities or anomalous traffic is detected. These systems also block traffic from suspicious IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.

An Intrusion Detection System is somewhat like an intrusion prevention system (IPS) which monitors networks for potentially damaging network traffic and threats; the only difference is IDS takes this process a step ahead as it primarily involves detecting and reporting those threats. Once these issues have been reported, a security operations center (SOC) analyst or incident responder can investigate the problem and take suitable actions to combat those threats. Isn't that super cool?

Well, it is also a fact that Intrusion Detection Systems haven’t always been this cool, thanks to technological advancements we’ve upgraded them over the years.
 

Chasing The Origins Of Intrusion Detection Systems

Long ago, system administrators performed the function of intrusion detection by sitting in front of a console and monitoring user activities. The detected intrusions by noticing the changes in activities, for instance, when a vacationing user has logged in locally or a seldom-user printer is oddly active. Soon, organizations realized that this type of intrusion detection was ad hoc and not scalable.

During the last 70s and early 80s, organizations used intrusion detection to audit logs and review evidence of unusual or malicious behavior. The admins typically printed audit logs on fan-folded paper, often stacked four to five feet high! It became apparent that this intrusion detection method was time-consuming, involved an overabundance of data and manual analysis led to errors in detection. However, this method had little room for detecting an attack in progress.

Technological advancements made storage cheaper, audit logs moved online and researchers developed programs to analyze data. Nevertheless, analysis was pretty slow and computationally intensive; therefore, detecting intrusion was usually run at night when there was a reduced load on the system. It eventually led to the late detection of intrusions.

With time, researchers developed systems that can be effectively deployed in large networks. That brings us to today when Intrusion Detection Systems are designed to be deployed in different environments. These systems are classified as host-based IDS, network-based IDS, hybrid IDS and a lot more!

We will get to the classification part later, for now, it's time to wind up this section and figure out how these systems actually work.
 

Figuring Out How Intrusion Detection Systems Work!

So far, it is clear that IDS is used to detect anomalies to catch intruders (hackers, attackers, etc.) before they damage the network. Let's see how this system works exactly. 
 

• IDS can be either network or host based. A host-based Intrusion Detection System is installed on the client computer, whereas a network-based IDS resides on the web or network to which the device is connected. 

• Intrusion Detection Systems look for signs of known attacks or abnormalities from regular activity. These abnormalities or anomalies are further examined at the protocol and application layer. They can effectively detect events and threats that hamper the organization's security.  

• An IDS can also be deployed as a software application running on a client's hardware or as a network security appliance. Some IDS are also available as cloud-based Intrusion Detection Systems that protect data and systems in cloud deployments.

As we promised, it's time to catch a glimpse of the classification of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Ready, steady, go!
 

Taking A Look At The Classification Of Intrusion Detection Systems

IDS come in different flavors as they deploy different methods to detect suspicious activity: 
 

• Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS)

  monitors inbound and outbound traffic to and from all the devices on the network.

• Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS)

  runs on all computers and identifies malicious activities that originate from the host. For instance, when the host device is infected with malware, it can further infect some other systems which need to be identified.

• Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (SIDS)

  are like antivirus applications that not only monitor all the packets traversing the network but also compare them against a database of attack signatures of malicious attacks.

• Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (AIDS)

  uses machine learning to baseline security policy and alert IT professionals about suspicious activity and policy violations.

With that, it's time to move ahead and find out how Intrusion Detection Systems are beneficial to organizations.
 

Counting Benefits Of Intrusion Detection Systems

 
The more, the merrier perfectly fits the benefits of Intrusion Detection Systems – and here's how!
 

• On-point Detection And Prevention Of Attacks

  Intrusion Detection Systems have a unique capability to detect and stop various attacks that firewalls, antivirus technologies and other enterprise security controls cannot automatically detect. It is beneficial in detecting distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks and malware infections by the strange pattern of network activity.

• Flawless Monitoring

  IDS monitors the working of routers, firewalls, key servers and files. These systems use an extensive attack signature database, raise the alarm and report to teams with appropriate notifications on detecting a breach or any malicious activity.

• User-friendly Interface

  Intrusion Detection Systems can be modified and changed according to specific clients' requirements. The user-friendly interface of IDS equips organizations with easy security management. Moreover, organizations can quickly identify and report any alterations made to files and directories when they have a customized interface.

Quite exciting past and present, there, right? Well, fasten your seatbelts as we are about to take a flight into the future of Intrusion Detection Systems!
 

Insights Into The Future Trends Of Intrusion Detection Systems

Intruders, hackers and attackers can now breach organizations from multiple points via cameras, automotive sensors and wearable devices. Intrusion Detection Systems, algorithms and data analysis will take the emerging IoT into the equation to combat this threat. Multiple data sources across all IoT devices will be distilled into a centralized place to deduce the intruder path. Eventually, Intrusion Detection Systems will ensure out-an-out detection of threats and breaches across all data sources.

Apart from this, soon AI algorithms will evolve to assist security products like Intrusion Detection Systems in continuously learning breaches and their behaviors. It will help organizations make connections between suspicious events and predict future evolutions of an attack.
 

To Sum It Up!