Dear SOC and IT Analysts,
You know that sinking feeling when you realize your firewall's as helpful as a wet paper towel? Yeah—same here. That’s why we need to talk about intrusion detection.
See, you can harden systems, patch CVEs, and build firewalls tall enough to make the NSA jealous, but someone somewhere is still gonna try to walk in the front door. And if you don't catch them in the act, you're just doing security theater. That's where intrusion detection isn’t just helpful. It’s the whole damn play.
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are your bouncers, your bloodhounds, your snitches with packet wiretaps. They aren’t perfect, but they’re essential. Because no matter how “zero trust” you think your setup is, there's always a tired intern clicking on a fake invoice at 4:59 PM.
Let me hit you with some truths from the research:
Attacks are growing fast. The CERT/CC documented an exponential increase in cyber incidents over the past decades, with tools so easy even a script kiddie can wreak havoc.¹
Firewalls alone aren’t enough. Intrusion detection fills the blind spots that static controls miss. As Lazarevic et al. put it, IDS “complement” conventional protections. They’re the difference between knowing about an attack and guessing it happened.²
IDSs are diverse, layered, and evolving. There’s misuse detection (great for catching known threats) and anomaly detection (essential for spotting the weird stuff). The best systems blend both.³
You don't need to deploy a nuclear SIEM cluster overnight. But if your IDS is still sitting in passive mode collecting dust—or worse, misconfigured and throwing false alarms like confetti—you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Do yourself a favor: audit your intrusion detection setup this week. Ask yourself:
And most importantly: when the alarms go off, does anyone actually care?
Because if you ignore your IDS long enough, the attackers won’t have to be sophisticated. They’ll just be lucky. And sometimes, lucky is all it takes.
Eyes open,
A Concerned Colleague
Lazarevic, Aleksandar, Vipin Kumar, and Jaideep Srivastava. "Intrusion Detection: A Survey." In Managing Cyber Threats: Issues, Approaches, and Challenges, edited by Vipin Kumar, Jaideep Srivastava, and Aleksandar Lazarevic, 19–78. Boston, MA: Springer, 2005.