Intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the applications or software that detects the malicious activities and vulnerabilities throughout the network. The purpose of IDS is to monitor the application-related activity, i.e., incoming and outgoing traffic, and to monitor the threats or attacks that are originating from the other networks; IDS detects lot of threats that are existing, but could not control or detect the new attacks and handle them. To overcome this, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) were introduced. The main task of IDPS is to monitor, detect, and prevent the threats and attacks. Till today, there are many attacks that prevailed IDPS. This paper concentrates or peeps through the birth of IDS and IDPS, briefly describes the various attacks and threats that are behind and beyond IDPS, and tries to create a new attack by adding some rules over the network that bypasses the monitoring of IDPS. In addition to this, this paper compares all the existing IDS/IDPS techniques and different types of IDPS and analyzes all the tools existing, compared with different metrics or parameters in different environments. © 2019, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.