IDS bells ringing

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 07:02:07PM -0600, patgus wrote:
>  Ok, not suprisingly I suppose my IDS is going nutso. As I have set
>myself up as an exit node this probably means people are hacking through
>tor. Guess that is to be expected.

I am not surprised by this, but not for the reason you indicate.

Intrusion detection systems suck. All the ones that I know about produce a
huge pile of false positives. Basically, once you start sending packets
around on a variety of protocols, your IDS is going to nutso. This
doesn't mean people are hacking through Tor. (However, with several
hundred thousand active Tor users, I'm sure a bit of bad stuff *is*
happening -- just like elsewhere on the Internet.)

See
http://www.sans.org/resources/idfaq/false_alarms.php
for another way of phrasing this.

Hope that helps,
--Roger