On Wednesday Sourcefire, Inc. announced that it is delivering cloud-based Intrusion Prevention services, based on its award-winning open source Snort technology. Snort and Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) rules are now available through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in the form of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), enabling customers to proactively monitor network activity for malicious behavior and provide automated responses.

Leveraging Snort installed on the AMI, customers of Amazon Web Services can further secure their most critical cloud-based applications with Sourcefire’s leading protection. Snort and Sourcefire VRT rules are also listed in the Amazon Web Services Solution Partner Directory, so that users can easily ensure that their AMI includes the latest updates.

With more than 285,000 registered users and nearly four million downloads to date, Snort is the world’s most widely deployed IPS. Used extensively throughout the Fortune 1000 and the U.S. government, Snort is the de facto standard for intrusion detection and prevention. It continues to be supported by the open source community, Sourcefire Snort development team and the VRT, a group of leading intrusion prevention experts working to discover, assess and respond to the latest trends in hacking activity, intrusion attempts and vulnerabilities.

The cloud-based Snort offering can be easily updated by downloading a new machine image and includes an intuitive user interface. Snort rules are automatically updated and available by the hour, further simplifying management and protection. This increased ease-of-use does not compromise Snort’s power or customization. Users’ retain the flexibility to easily tune and write their own rules.

“This new Snort service enables Amazon Web Services’ users to protect the most critical assets in their cloud universe, providing an easy to manage solution that is automatically updated in real-time with the latest rules,” said Matt McCormick, Vice President of Business Development at Sourcefire. “Sourcefire’s architecture and approach provides a number of opportunities to leverage cloud-based services, and we look forward to working with our customers to add even more protection for their Web services.”