IT and General is an official Cisco Talos Snort Integrator. We help organisations deploy and operate Snort with consistent policy control, predictable performance, and clean operational handover, whether you are running pfSense at the edge or building a standardised multi-site security baseline.
Cisco Talos Snort Official Integrator UK
Official Snort integration, licensing, and deployment support for pfSense, enterprise, and multi-site environments
This page is your “single pane of glass” for Snort with IT and General: licensing, design, integration, rollout, and ongoing optimisation. If you simply need a licence, start here. If you need the whole solution designed and implemented, we do that too.
Common use cases include: branch and multi-site IDS or IPS, compliance-driven logging and alerting, hardened remote access VPN perimeters, and environments that need measurable improvements in detection without sacrificing throughput.
Services
Architecture & Policy Design
Rule strategy, pass lists, IPS vs IDS mode, interface placement, and rollout design for single site or standardised estates.
Integration & Deployment
Implementation on pfSense and adjacent tooling, change control, documentation, and production-ready builds.
Optimisation & Operations
Performance tuning, false-positive reduction, rule lifecycle, and practical operational processes for your team.
Snort on pfSense
Snort on pfSense is the power of the world’s leading open source network Intrusion Detection System on the world’s most trusted open source firewall.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cisco Talos is Cisco’s threat intelligence and research organisation. Snort is developed and maintained by Cisco Talos and uses its threat research, vulnerability intelligence, and rule updates to detect and prevent malicious activity.
An official integrator designs, deploys, tunes, and supports Snort IDS and IPS deployments. This includes rule selection, performance tuning, logging, alerting, and operational integration within pfSense and enterprise environments.
Yes. We supply and manage Snort subscriptions for pfSense deployments, including guidance on licensing selection, renewal planning, and maintaining rule continuity during upgrades.
IDS and IPS differ primarily in how traffic is handled during inspection. In IDS mode, traffic is allowed to pass through the firewall normally and a copy of the traffic is inspected by Snort or Suricata. If a rule match occurs, the event is logged and the source can be blocked after the fact. This means malicious traffic may reach its destination before enforcement occurs, but there is minimal impact on latency and throughput. In IPS mode, traffic is diverted to Snort or Suricata for inline inspection before it reaches its destination. If a rule match occurs, the packet is dropped immediately and never reaches the target system. This provides stronger real-time prevention but can introduce latency and requires careful tuning and hardware sizing. Choosing between IDS and IPS depends on risk tolerance, performance requirements, and traffic profiles. We help organisations assess, design, and tune the appropriate mode to balance security effectiveness with operational performance.
Performance impact depends on throughput, enabled rule sets, logging configuration, and hardware capacity. Proper sizing and tuning ensures Snort delivers effective security without unnecessary performance degradation.
Yes. We design standardised Snort configurations, rule policies, and change processes suitable for multi-site and large-scale deployments, ensuring consistency and operational control.
pfSense provides stateful firewalling, routing, and VPN services, while Snort adds deep packet inspection and threat detection using Cisco Talos intelligence. Together they deliver layered network security.
Yes. We provide ongoing tuning, troubleshooting, rule optimisation, performance reviews, and operational support to ensure Snort remains effective as networks and threat landscapes evolve.
Snort subscription rules provide access to up-to-date threat detection signatures maintained by Cisco Talos. These rules cover malware, exploit attempts, reconnaissance activity, and emerging threats.
An Oinkcode is a unique authentication token issued with a Snort subscription. It allows supported firewalls, IDS, and IPS platforms to securely download and update rule sets directly from Cisco Talos repositories.
Yes. Many Snort rules are compatible with Suricata. Platforms such as pfSense and other supported security appliances can use Snort subscription rules in Suricata mode where Oinkcode-based rule downloads are supported.
No. Snort subscription rules can be used on any supported firewall or security appliance that runs Snort or Suricata and allows Oinkcode configuration, subject to platform capabilities.
Subscription usage depends on licensing terms and deployment scale. We provide guidance to ensure compliant use across single devices, clustered firewalls, lab environments, and multi-site deployments.
Yes. Where a firewall or security appliance supports Snort or Suricata engines and allows Oinkcode-based rule downloads, Snort subscription rules can typically be integrated and tuned.
Rule updates are released frequently by Cisco Talos to address newly identified vulnerabilities, malware campaigns, and emerging threats.
Yes. We tune rule categories, thresholds, and suppressions to reduce false positives while maintaining effective threat detection aligned with real-world traffic patterns.