Networks and hosts are probed hundreds or thousands of times a day in an attempt to discover vulnerabilities. An even greater number of automated attacks from worms and viruses stress the same devices. The sheer volume of log messages or events generated by these attacks and probes, combined with the complexity of an analyst needing to use multiple monitoring tools, often makes it impossible to adequately investigate what is happening.

Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System (MARS) is a next-generation Security Threat Mitigation system (STM). Cisco Security MARS receives raw network and security data and performs correlation and investigation of host and network information to provide you with actionable intelligence. This easy-to-use family of threat mitigation appliances enables you to centralize, detect, mitigate, and report on priority threats by leveraging the network and security devices already deployed in a network, even if the devices are from multiple vendors.

Security Monitoring with Cisco Security MARS helps you plan a MARS deployment and learn the installation and administration tasks you can expect to face. Additionally, this book teaches you how to use the advanced features of the product, such as the custom parser, Network Admission Control (NAC), and global controller operations. Through the use of real-world deployment examples, this book leads you through all the steps necessary for proper design and sizing, installation and troubleshooting, forensic analysis of security events, report creation and archiving, and integration of the appliance with Cisco and third-party vulnerability assessment tools.