Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #428 9/4/2018


Question: What is Security Onion?

Answer:

Security Onion is a suite of programs that are used to find security problems on a computer or network. Security Onion runs in the Linux operating system.

Cybersecurity professionals use the programs in Security Onion to do a number of tasks.

The first item is they can monitor network traffic and look at all the packets that travel across the network and place filters to watch for unusual packets that may indicate a security problem is occurring.

The second is there is a program included that will detect in traffic across the network that meets various parameters of a security incident. Not only do you want to know when someone starts breaking in your network but also when they are scoping it out.

There are other programs and tools that will allow us to record and examine traffic for problems and to be able to trace where came from and where attacked and also quite often what information was exposed.

Security Onion is a powerful suite of tools and programs for a cybersecurity professional to keep your network, computer and information secure and safe.

This past week I completed a cybersecurity operations course from Cisco that trains how to use tools like Security Onion. The course taught these concepts and also approved me to teach this course in Cisco Academies.