Monday, January 7, 2019

The return of the Snort community rule contest

After a brief hiatus, the SNORTⓇ community rule contest is back. Here at Snort, we always strive to improve our detection. And we appreciate it when our community joins in the fight against the bad guys.

We are reviving the contest as a way to thank those of you who regularly engage with us and submit rules that we wind up deploying. While the old contest ran on a monthly basis, this time around, we will be giving out prizes on a quarterly basis.

Each quarter, we will give out a Snort-themed prize — whether it be a calendar, T-shirt, mug or something else exciting — to the community member who submits the most rules to us during that time. Be sure to follow us on Twitter each quarter to see who the winner is. If you are the winner, be sure to keep an eye out in your inbox for details on how to claim your prize.

We are accepting signatures into the community ruleset (GPLv2 licensed) via the Snort-Sigs mailing list, which anyone may join here. If you’d like to submit to the Snort ruleset please include your rule and research behind it (pcap, ASCII dump, references, etc.).

When we receive a signature, we will follow our standard internal procedures (which involves heavy QA of the signature, testing, optimization for performance, and perhaps sending the rule out to our internal and external testing groups).

You may reference the Snort Users Manual for general rules questions, as well as of course discussing it among fellow Snort rule writers in the aforementioned mailing list.

The rules will be released in the Snort rule set and are available to our customers and the Snort community as a whole via our normal community rule distribution process, published daily, with full attribution given to the author.

As always, false positive reports belong here after logging in.

The highest submitter for accepted rules for each quarter will receive some Snort goodies. Keep in mind that we must accept the rules for them to be counted toward your total for the quarter. For example, if you write a rule for an ICMP response on the network, we are not going to accept it.

We thank the community in advance for rule submissions, as well as continued submission of false positive reports.