IPS, or intrusion prevention system, is a network preventive technology that oversees network traffic to find and fight back any vulnerabilities.
IPSs have the capability to answer to threats quicker than other preventing or detection systems.
The network administrator has the ability to pre-set a number of rules that will lead to IPS to act upon a threat automatically.
According to Palo Alto Networks, vulnerability exploits usually come in the form of malicious inputs to a target application or service that attackers use to interrupt and gain control of an application or machine.
Within the IPS ecosystem there are four different types of system.
There is the network-based IPS (NIPS) which analyses protocol activity to monitor the network. There are also the wireless IPSs (WIPS) to monitor wireless networks.
In addition, there is network behaviour analysis (NBA), which looks at network traffic to uncover threats from unusual traffic flows.
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Lastly, host-based IPSs (HIPS) are a software package that analyses occurring events within a single host to find potential damaging activity.
