Suricata
Suricata is an open-source network threat detection engine that can work as an IDS, an inline IPS and a network security monitor.
Legal & ethical use. Use this tool only on systems, networks and data that you own or have explicit written permission to test. Unauthorised access or scanning can break computer-misuse laws (for example Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016, and equivalents elsewhere). Practise in your own lab or in authorised environments such as CTFs.
What it is used for
- Detect known-bad traffic with signature rules
- Generate EVE JSON logs for a SIEM
Key features
- Multi-threaded rule engine
- Protocol parsing and file extraction
- EVE JSON output
Installation
See docs.suricata.io for distribution packages and build steps.
Beginner usage guide
Test rules against a pcap first (offline mode) before enabling the engine on live traffic, and review alerts in eve.json.
Example commands
Run these only against your own lab or authorised targets. Placeholder addresses such as 192.0.2.x are documentation ranges.
Run on a pcap and write logs to ./logs
suricata -r capture.pcap -l ./logs-r reads a capture offline, -l sets the log directory.
References
Source verification
Last reviewed: 2026-10-27
Links checked over HTTP: 2026-10-27 07:51 UTC — official: 200, docs: 200, repo: 200
Commands were written from the official documentation and have not been executed on this site; test them in your lab.