Installing Snort on Windows

On March 12, the Sourcefire team announced the release of Snort 2.9.7.2, the latest update to one of the most popular (and open source) network IDS tools. Detailed instructions for installing Snort on either Ubuntu Linux or Windows 7 are available under the Learning tab of this website. All things equal, installing Snort on Linux is preferred to Windows, especially for real-world use, but for learning about the tool or experimenting with rule-writing and alert generation either operating system is workable. The Windows approach is often preferred for less technical users looking to understand the basics of Snort because Windows installation is more automated and takes much less time than it does on Linux. As you can see from the video linked above, from start to finish the Windows installation process can be completed in as little as 20 minutes.