Imagine you’re at home and you have a special alarm system. This alarm system can tell when someone who isn’t supposed to be there tries to get into your house. It might look for things like a door or window opening when it shouldn’t, or someone moving around inside the house when you’re not there.
An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is much like that alarm system, but it’s for a computer network instead of a house. It watches for signs that someone might be trying to sneak into the network. This could be things like strange or unexpected kinds of traffic, lots of attempts to connect to a service, or anything else that’s out of the ordinary.
So, just like your home alarm system helps keep out burglars, an IDS helps keep hackers out of a computer network!