One common question I’ve received is what open source tools are available that I can download now. The answer to this question is simple: LOTS! I will point out however, there are reasons why organizations don’t just run only open-source products within their security operation center. There are costs and benefits to open source, which I’ll address this this post. I’m also asked if opensource is better or not than certain tools, which my reply is “it depends on what you are looking to accomplish”. I believe there are some misunderstanding regarding open-source tools in the security community and I aim to address those now in this post.
In this post, I’ll address the cost and benefits of using open-source tools as well as provide recommendations for various types of open-source tools. I’ll first start off with explaining when it does and does not make sense to use open source or free tools.
