Third Brigade has bought OSSEC, an open-source competitor to its host intrusion detection and prevention system.

Ottawa-based Third Brigade said it had bought the OSSEC project and related trademarks, as well as copyrights held by the project's creator and primary developer, Daniel Cid, and the OSSEC.net domain, website and website content.

Mr. Cid has also joined the Third Brigade team as principal researcher for OSSEC development.

"OSSEC is a very successful open source security project, and there are many organizations that are requesting enterprise-calibre support for their OSSEC deployments," said Third Brigade CEO Wael Mohamed in a statement. "Like Third Brigade, OSSEC is committed to delivering best-of-breed, host-based security controls for multi-platform, enterprise server environments. Together, we will ensure the continued success of this thriving open source community through dedicated resources and extended support."

The OSSEC project is a multi-platform, scalable host-based intrusion detection system which provides security controls including automatic IP address blocking, log analysis, integrity checking, real-time alerting and active response. The project has active users in 40 countries, including two of the largest U.S. commercial banks, the top three U.S. entertainment companies and more than 150 universities and colleges such as the University of California at Berkeley.

The project was started in 2003 and has issued five major releases in the past two years.

Third Brigade said it will continue to contribute to the free open source community with new releases of OSSEC, extend commercial support and training to the community, as well as incorporating its functionality into future Third Brigade products.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.