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Third Brigade annexes open source intrusion detection tech

GPL security project goes under commercial management

OSSEC, the open source host-based intrusion detection project, has been snapped up by Third Brigade, a commercial firm in the same information security sub-market. Terms of the deal, announced on Tuesday, were undisclosed.

Daniel Cid, creator and primary developer for OSSEC, has become the principal researcher at Third Brigade, which has promised to continue contributing to the open source community with further editions of OSSEC. Third Brigade plans to make its money from support and training. It also plans to benefit from the acquisition by rolling OSSEC's technology into its own technology portfolio.

Host-based intrusion prevention software packages are designed to protect servers or PCs from malware infection or hacking attack. OSSEC's multi-platform offering also features log analysis, integrity checking and alerting features.

OSSEC began as an open source project five years ago in 2003. The most recent of five subsequent software releases came out in May. Members of the OSSEC community includes two of the largest commercial banks in the US, aerospace and defense firms and more than 150 universities and colleges.

The acquisition of OSSEC represents the continuation of the trend for open source security projects have come under the stewardship of commercial firms.

Snort is maintained by intrusion detection firm Sourcefire, which bought the ClamAV open source anti-virus package in August 2007. Sourcefire was founded by Martin Roesch, the creator of SNORT, in 2001.

Modsecurity, the open source web application firewall, has been under under the stewardship of Breach Security since September 2006.

Nessus the free (for non-commercial users) vulnerability scanning package. Tenable Network Security, the firm co-founded by Renaud Deraison, the creator of Nessus, moved over to a closed source license in October 2005. OpenVAS, a spin-off project, maintains earlier versions of Nessus as an open source vulnerability scanner. ®

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