February 12, 2002

Federal Reserve Bank

After covering current events and chapter business, we heard three presentations:

Prioritizing System Patches - Gary Warner of Energen presented this reminder of how critical it is that we have a documented procedure to follow for ensuring that critical vendor-provided patches have been applied to our systems.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems - Chris Green discussed the theory of Network-based Intrusion Detection Systems, and shared many examples from personal experience using Snort to monitor UAB networks.

Enterprise Intrusion Detection Systems - Greg McGill shared the plans for IDS at BlueCross BlueShield, stressing the importance of monitoring traffic between "security zones" of a network, and especially at the perimeter.

What made the meeting "the best" was the high degree of interaction that came from Chris and Greg sharing two very different approaches to Intrusion Detection Systems. Audience Participation was at an all-time high, and at least one very rewarding informal lunch session took place afterwards.