Snort 2.8.5.2 no longer receives rule updates

Note: 2.9.0.1 is available in Debian experimental.

Thanks for responding to this bug. I would classify this as medium instead of wishlist, though. The inability to run current rules severely impacts this non-core application, the sole function of Snort is to check traffic against an up-to-date list of signatures that correspond to malicious traffic and that functionality is crippled by the inability of this version to operate with current sigs.

There is also a security impact to this bug because Snort is an application that users expect to provide security protection, similar to anti-virus. As a network-based security application, it may be used to provide protection to many systems at once (I operate Snort sensors that protect tens of thousands of client-systems by inspecting traffic at the border of my network). Like anti-virus sigs that are a year or more old, the sigs that this version of Snort is capable of running provide much less protection than current versions and probably less protection than users believe they are getting.

This bug was fixed in the package snort - 2.9.2-3ubuntu1

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snort (2.9.2-3ubuntu1) precise; urgency=low

  * Merge from Debian testing. (LP: #931454) Remaining changes:
    - debian/rules: use mysql_config to find libraries to fix FTBFS with
      multiarch libmysqlclient.
  * Dropped "Fixed typo in snort.8": patched upstream.

snort (2.9.2-3) unstable; urgency=low

  * Restore code from the 2.8.5.2-5 package onwards which was lost when
    the version of experimental was moved to the archive.
     - Now /var/lib/snort is created through package configuration, as
       it should have been
     - Remove md5sum files when purging (Closes: #657038)
  * debian/rules:
      - Enable IPv6 support which was optional in version 2.8 for the Snort
        binary package. This is not enabled for the database binary packages
        (snort-pgsql and snort-mysql) as the database schemas do not support
        IPv6. (Closes: #633064) (LP: #703707)
      - Include the quilt makefile and add dependencies in -stamp and
        clean targets
  * debian/snort.init.d:
      - Do not abort if the package is not configured to use a database but
        the db-pending-config semaphore is found. Remove it instead and
        continue. This can happen if a database-related package was installed,
        removed and then 'snort' is installed afterwards.
        (LP: #316878, #639755, #722488, #754230, #798608, #876615, #816634, #891904, #918250)
  * debian/snort-{mysql,pgsql}.postrm:
      - Remove the db-pending-config semaphore file when removing the package.
        This prevents errors with the snort.init.d logic if a database package
        is left unconfigured and then replaced with the snort (non-database)
        package.
  * debian/README-database.Debian: Indicate that database support will be
    deprecated in 2.9 and document that IPv6 is not supported either
  * debian/control:
     - Add Build-Depends on quilt
     - Add VCS entries
     - Put the complete maintainer's name in UTF-8
     - Change Uploaders, add Andrew Pollock and remove Pascal Hakim
     - Update Standards Version

snort (2.9.2-2) unstable; urgency=low

  * debian/control: Add net-tools to Depends: of snort, snort-mysql and
    snort-pgsql since 'ifconfig' is required for the configuration script
    to work. (Closes: #656445)
  * debian/snort{,-mysql,-psql}.postinst: Create the checksum directory if it
    does not exist right at the beginning since it might not be created.
    (Closes: #656445)

snort (2.9.2-1) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Andrew Pollock ]
  * New upstream release, upload to unstable
     - Fixes CVE-2009-3641: DoS while printing specially-crafted IPv6 packet
       using the -v option (Closes: 553584)
     - The package no longer build-depends on iptables-dev and the negated list
       of architectures is no longer used (Closes: 634660)
     - debian/patches/config: Patch the configuration file to remove include
       files not currently available (Closes: #619446)
     - This version is fully supported rule-wise (LP: #872582)
  * Switch to dpkg-source 3.0 (quilt) format
  * Port across all changes from Snort 2.8.5.2-5 and later in unstable
  * debi...