Firewalls are the first line of defense and the most widely used tool in cyber security. They can be very powerful if applied correctly, but they are limited in their scope. Packets are analyzed as they come in and compared to a set of priorities. The limitation is that the priorities can only read and act on the header information of the packet: this includes data like the type, source IP address and port number, and the destination IP address and port number. Therefore the ability to act on incoming packets is quick but may miss attacks that are based on packet content. For example, a cross-site scripting attack could come from any IP; a firewall cannot predict where this attack will come from, so a new tool is needed to analyze packet content. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) serve exactly that purpose. IDS’ can be very powerful due to their ability to look inside packets at all the information. Consider the scenario: an IDS could look at a packet attempting a cross-site scripting and notice the exact text attempting the attack and compare that to a known cross-site scripting signature. A limitation for an IDS is that it can be slower. When taking into account its ability to analyze more data, a slower analysis time is certainly reasonable. Traditional and current firewall systems are failing. The increase in both the number of attacks and the complexity of attacks has put the conventional system out of date. The Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2017 [1] interviewed 3000 companies across the U.S., U.K., and Germany. According to the report 53% of companies were poorly prepared and only 30% were very prepared for cyber-attacks. This lack of preperation is concerning as cyber-attacks have such an effect on both the economy and people’s personal lives. The total cost of cybercrime was $450 billion, and 2 billion personal records were stolen in 2016 [2]. The most recent WannaCry ransomware attack in May of 2017 infected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries. It encrypted all the files on a system and demanded a $300 payment to unencrypt them. This attack was especially harmful in Europe where it infected multiple hospitals’ systems [3]. Not only as computer users do we have to be concerned about our own security, but the security of companies and organizations that we rely.