Hacker News Reader

Comment by ketzu | Hacker News Reader

> Zeek (formerly Bro)

People that encountered network security probably know the name "Bro" much better. Apparently they rebranded in 2018.

Wikipedia has the following to say about it:

> Dr. Paxson originally named the software "Bro" as a warning regarding George Orwell's Big Brother from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 2018 the project leadership team decided to rename the software. At LBNL in the 1990s, the developers ran their sensors as a pseudo-user named “zeek”, thereby inspiring the name change in 2018.

View on HN

Other "fun" fact. I went to a B-Sides conference where one of the higher ups from the Bro Platform talked about how they had to purchase the domain from a fraternity.

Zeek is cool but I always thought Bro was a neat name for a sec product.

It's funny how it was named ironically / in caution, and subsequently changed.

I wonder how long until Palantir rebrands...

Bro is definitely popular, but I wonder where they got the "world’s most popular network security monitoring platform" phrase from.

because it's probably the world's most popular security monitoring platform? it's been around for a long time, it does it's job very well, and it's available in whatever flavor of implementation difficulty you want. from completely free roll yourself, to easy to deploy via push button with thousands of detections already to go for you.

even most of the enterprise solutions sold for network monitoring proudly boast that they use bro under the hood for their stream parsing engine.

> probably

I agree, and I'd like to understand the reason why "probably" disappeared from the press release. If you claim something, you should be able to back it up with some numbers, right? I'm a big fan of Bro and fully agree with the "leading solution" or "everybody is using it" phrases, I just miss the data that would make it the number one.

Everyone uses it. Gov/Military deploy it everywhere and I’d estimate most of the Fortune 1000 does too.

I’ve never heard of anyone anywhere using such software. In Europe it might even be illegal?

Could your POV be somewhat US-centric?

I’ve been a part of teams that have sold tons of it to European governments and corporations. Anything the US Department of Defense uses has a great chance of being used across Europe. We train Euro militaries on how to use these tools.

> Everyone uses it.

I hear this phrase about many software platforms. That's why I'd like to see some numbers before someone uses an absolute qualifier. I have no idea how popular is Zeek against OSSEC, Suricata or Snort these days, I'm just wary of claiming something without providing any justification.

I think the real issue here is that things like Snort, Suricata, and Zeek are just not very popular as a class of security thingy anymore. Certainly, for the last 10 years or so, I'd have advised most startups I worked with against deploying anything like them. There was, in the long-long-ago, a huge industry debate about whether detection and response was best done in the network or on the endpoint. That debate has been settled: most places deploy EDR, and few places deploy IPS.

The DoD would beg to differ. EDR is a huge business indeed but often network monitoring is used in conjunction.

Also startups make up almost nothing of the ecosystem. Fortune 1000 and Gov have millions of different departments that have their own requirements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com