Network Security for Dummies Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this Network Security for Dummies after spending two frustrating hours in a large bookstore looking at one security text after another and finding that they were all written for people who already know a lot about networks. I suppose the assumption is that you won't get into network security until you have experience running a network, but the small company where I work only just set up a network and we need security right away. We can't afford to pay someone to run the network or be in charge of security. To my relief, the author of Network Security for Dummies understands this. It is obvious that she is just as knowledgeable about protecting networks as the authors of the other books I looked at (I was pretty amazed at what I found when I searched the web for the NRO, which the cover says is where she used to work). But she has taken the time to explain things to those of us who don't live and breathe computers. And she does so without talking down to you. At work we have already used some of the techniques she suggests and I feel confident we can make our network a lot more secure than it was, without spending a lot of money, but with the added advantage of really understanding what we are doing.

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CNN is reporting that a vicious new virus is wreaking havoc on the world's computer networks. Somebody's hacked one of your favorite Web sites and stolen thousands of credit card numbers. The FBI just released a new report on computer crime that's got you shaking in your boots. The experts will tell you that keeping your network safe from the cyber-wolves howling after your assets is complicated, expensive, and best left to them. But the truth is, anybody with a working knowledge of networks and computers can do just about everything necessary to defend their network against most security threats.
Network Security For Dummies arms you with quick, easy, low-cost solutions to all your network security concerns. Whether your network consists of one computer with a high-speed Internet connection or hundreds of workstations distributed across dozens of locations, you'll find what you need to confidently:
Identify your network's security weaknesses
Install an intrusion detection system
Use simple, economical techniques to secure your data
Defend against viruses
Keep hackers at bay
Plug security holes in individual applications
Build a secure network from scratch

Leading national expert Chey Cobb fills you in on the basics of data security, and he explains more complex options you can use to keep your network safe as your grow your business. Among other things, you'll explore:
Developing risk assessments and security plans
Choosing controls without breaking the bank
Anti-virus software, firewalls, intrusion detection systems and access controls
Addressing Unix, Windows and Mac security issues
Patching holes in email, databases, Windows Media Player, NetMeeting, AOL Instant Messenger, and other individual applications
Securing a wireless network
E-Commerce security
Incident response and disaster recovery

Whether you run a storefront tax preparing business or you're the network administrator at a multinational accounting giant, your computer assets are your business. Let Network Security For Dummies provide you with proven strategies and techniques for keeping your precious assets safe.

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Network Security Bible Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a great book; it goes in great detail about security in all aspects of the computer industry. However it lacks one critical aspect, how do I do that? Like all network and computer professionals, I do not know everything, so when you tell me I should do something a certain way I'd hope that you will also tell me how to do it. With this book I found myself saying, maybe they will tell me what to do later, over and over, never happens. If you want to buy a book that's a reference manual, this is the one to get. If you are looking for a "how to" as well as a "what to look for" book, consider looking elsewhere.

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Hacking For Dummies Review

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(More customer reviews)I used to wonder why anyone would want to break into my computer, there's not much there of any interest. Even I don't find it all that interesting. Then one day I was puzzled when my ISP asked why my machine was putting out millions of bytes of stuff to the point where it was bogging down their T1 line. I didn't know. We unpluged the machine from the network and it stopped sending. We plugged it back in and it wasn't sending. But the next day it was.
It wasn't until we got an e-mail telling us to stop sending out copyrighted movies that we realized what had happened. It wasn't anything in my computer they wanted, it was the bandwidth. Knowing what to look for it wasn't all that hard to stop. Google quickly provided links on this problem.
This book is aimed at people just like me. It gives an overall, if fairly light, view of the overall security problem. Like the other For Dummies books it has a writing style that doesn't (quite) put you to sleep. It has enough humor to enable you to get through it. It won't make you an expert, but it will point out the problem areas so that you can go deeper into those that are important to you. It's a good introduction.

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A new edition of the bestselling guide-now updated to cover the latest hacks and how to prevent them!
It's bad enough when a hack occurs-stealing identities, bank accounts, and personal information. But when the hack could have been prevented by taking basic security measures-like the ones described in this book-somehow that makes a bad situation even worse. This beginner guide to hacking examines some of the best security measures that exist and has been updated to cover the latest hacks for Windows 7 and the newest version of Linux.
Offering increased coverage of Web application hacks, database hacks, VoIP hacks, and mobile computing hacks, this guide addresses a wide range of vulnerabilities and how to identify and prevent them. Plus, you'll examine why ethical hacking is oftentimes the only way to find security flaws, which can then prevent any future malicious attacks.
Explores the malicious hackers's mindset so that you can counteract or avoid attacks completely
Covers developing strategies for reporting vulnerabilities, managing security changes, and putting anti-hacking policies and procedures in place
Completely updated to examine the latest hacks to Windows 7 and the newest version of Linux
Explains ethical hacking and why it is essential

Hacking For Dummies, 3rd Edition shows you how to put all the necessary security measures in place so that you avoid becoming a victim of malicious hacking.

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Mobile Malware Attacks and Defense Review

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(More customer reviews)Security threats on mobile platforms are one of the key topics and main targets for the next couple of years, given the ubiquity and popularity of these devices, plus their advanced capabilities and use of sensitive application: micro payments, online banking and e-commerce, access to "the cloud", etc.
This book is one of the few references, if not the only one (till very recently), focused on the multiple security aspects of the mobile ecosystem. As such, it constitutes a great historical reference about what mobile malware (referred as MM) and threats were until its publication, in late 2008.
The book starts by introducing mobile malware, although it can be a bit confusing for the novice reader, as it mixes up attacks, tools and threats (most them Bluetooth based), and for example, WiFi is not even mentioned (yet). The next chapter (ch 2) provides an interesting overview on how mobile malware shows up in a terminal from a user perspective, including the most common behaviors and the kind of interaction expected from the user. It would be great to have a detailed explanation of the propagation method, as with CommWarrior, for all the samples analyzed in this chapter.
The next three chapters (ch 3-5) are a really valuable historical reference about mobile malware, including its timeline, how it has evolved since 2000 till 2008, the types of threats, categorized by malware families, the most significant or famous specimens, such as Cabir in the Bluetooth side, plus an extensive taxonomy of mobile malware and threats based on the infection strategy, distribution and payload. Although some tables, with more than 400 references, could have been moved to an appendix to facilitate the reading, this set of chapters summarizes how mobile malware seriously started, back in 2004, and evolved over time. The comparison of different pieces of malware, and the extra analysis of the most relevant specimens, together with the technical details they used to survive, makes this section of the book a very good "encyclopedia".
Then, the book reflects the influence of multiple authors, presenting different unconnected and independent chapters. The phishing, SMSishing and Vishing chapter moves out of the mobile space, covering lots of details about these threats on traditional environments, such as common web browser based solutions, and the usage and purpose of the network captures attached is still not clear to me. I still remember my surprise from a technical perspective when I read that the transmitted data between the client and the verification server could not be identified, as they were using an SSL connection: "What about using a HTTP(S) interception proxy?" Finally, it includes an extensive phishing academic research mainly based on Bayesian networks and a distributed framework, which on my opinion, is clearly out of the scope of the book.
The more technical chapters come next; chapter 7 focuses on the core elements for the most widely used mobile platforms, their protection mechanisms and how they have been bypassed in the past, covering mainly Windows Mobile (WM), iPhone, Symbian, BlackBerry and J2ME (Java). It includes a extremely short summary on prevention and exploitation. This is complemented by the techniques, methods and tools available for the analysis of mobile malware (ch 8), the in-depth details for the disassembly and debugging of associated binaries (ch 10), plus the strategy and main constraints to perform a forensic analysis on this type of devices (chapters 8 and 9). This is by far the most relevant technical portion of the book.
The book follows the old and useful Syngress layout tradition of adding a few common sections at the end of each chapter to reinforce the material covered: Summary, Solutions Fast Track, and FAQ.
The first portion of the book (ch 1-5) will be an eye opener for a non-technical audience; highly recommended, together with the last chapter (ch 11) focused on the defensive side and how to mitigate all the threats covered along the book. The second portion for the book (ch 7-10) is focused on security professionals, mainly incident handlers and forensic analyst that need to deal with the technical aspects of mobile attacks and infections.
Due to the new mobile threats and issues that turned up in 2009 for the advanced smartphone platforms (like iPhone or Android), and the trend for new and more dangerous specimens expected in 2010, a second volume or edition would be a must.


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Aggressive Network Self-Defense Review

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(More customer reviews)Continuing in the new theme of fiction and technical how-to, Aggressive Network Self-Defense brings together several authors to provide a wide range of material. Syngress' niche in this space seems to be breaking new ground -- and for the most part, it works. While you don't get as in-depth a treatment as a typical technical book gives you, there is an added dimension: namely, a more realistic scenario of how these tools fit together in a real, live series of actions.
Not being a big fan of most fiction (I tend to prefer history), it's hard to say definitively good or bad things about the quality of the writing. What I can say is that it's infinitely less irritating, and far more realistic, than Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or Gibson's Neuromancer. No over-the-top smearing of adjectives to describe the mundane, and no unrealistic sequences of events. Then again, there's no character development and no real story progression, so it's not great fiction.
As a series of hacker vignettes, the book works just fine, and very well for the purposes at hand. Basically, what the authors want you to get from the book is two-fold: First, they want you to debate the issues around "strike back" attack methodologies. Several of the authors are open advocates of what are legal grey areas and open moral questions in the field of network security. Secondly, they want you to see how it's done, what you do when you actually use a tool to achieve a goal. Most books that do this, like Hacking Exposed, cover far more tools, but they usually do so without showing you each tool's use in a real-world scenario.
I won't bore you with a lengthy, detailed overview of the first part of the book. Like I said, it's a series of part fiction, part tutorial series of short stories. In them, you'll see tools like Metasploit, virus creation, some nmap, sniffers, and keystroke loggers, all in action, being used as an operator would use them, and achieving real goals. This is more valuable than a basic manual, and the stories themselves act as a nice setting. While not great fiction writers, the authors are decent enough at the job, and they write the technical material clearly.
The second part of the book is interesting. It makes up about a fifth of the book in volume, but a lot more in technical weight. The book bills this section as "The technologies and concepts behind network strike-back," and that's an accurate summary. It's a series of four unique perspectives and technical chapters that complement the rest of the book quite well.
The first introduces ADAM, the "Active Defense Algorithm and Model," which develops a methodology for network administrators to actively defend their networks against attacks. It's quite interesting, and brings together a number of risk models in an uncommon take. The authors are academic researchers from the University of Idaho, so it's a lot more academic than the previous material in Aggressive Network Self-Defense, but it formalizes a lot of the thinking that was present in the writing of the stories and techniques.
The second is Tim Mullen's classic "Defending your right to defend." This is the original position paper shared by Mullen with the information security community in 2002 or so. Here, Mullen makes a compelling case for actually striking back at worm infected hosts. After all, the position holds, someone should do something about them to help clean up the Internet. While it's a position I disagreed with at the time and still do, Mullen's writing is articulate and an important read. It really helps you understand a lot of the thinking that went into the book itself.
Dan Kaminsky wrote the next chapter, "MD5 to be considered harmful someday." Largely considered to be a follow-on to Joux and Wang's one-way hash function research, what it shows is how practical such an attack can be. Kaminsky never fails to come up with interesting ideas he puts into practice, and he adds another level of depth to this book.
Finally, Aggressive Network Self-Defense ends with an interesting paper, "When the tables turn: Passive strike-back." Like any good paper, it has a clear and thoughtful motivation, and really demonstrates the principles at play, namely building network resources that don't simply lure the attacker in, they trip her up. There are so many ways to do this, the authors show us, and ultimately it's almost fun. A good way to end the book.
An over-arching concern with the book that I have is the question of ethics. Mullen, in the foreword, states that he hopes the book stirs a debate about the ethics of the actions in the book. However, the book itself falls short in this area. Instead, sometimes the characters get busted, and sometimes they don't, but just because they didn't get caught doesn't mean some ethical lines weren't crossed. All too often the authors leave the ethical debate up in the air. While I prefer this to overt preaching or questions, the style leaves me wondering if this goal was achieved.
So, where do I stand on Aggressive Network Self-Defense? In the end, I like it, more so than a book like Hacking Exposed or other "hacking how-to" types. The style of presentation doesn't lend itself all that well to exploring a very wide number of tools, but it does give you a deeper context to see how they assemble into something larger. For many people I expect it will be a page turner, and I think the format has some utility, as shown here.

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Over the past year there has been a shift within the computer security world away from passive, reactive defense towards more aggressive, proactive countermeasures. Although such tactics are extremely controversial, many security professionals are reaching into the dark side of their tool box to identify, target, and suppress their adversaries. This book will provide a detailed analysis of the most timely and dangerous attack vectors targeted at operating systems, applications, and critical infrastructure and the cutting-edge counter-measures used to nullify the actions of an attacking, criminal hacker.*First book to demonstrate and explore controversial network strike back and countermeasure techniques. *Provides tightly guarded secrets to find out WHO is really attacking you over the internet. *Provides security professionals and forensic specialists with invaluable information for finding and prosecuting criminal hackers.

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