Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I must start this review by stating the lead author lists me in the Acknowledgments and elsewhere in the book, which I appreciate. I also did consulting work years ago for the lead author's company, and I know the lead author to be a good guy with a unique eye for applying geography to network security data. Addison-Wesley provided me a review copy.
I did not participate in the writing process for Practical Intrusion Analysis (PIA), but after reading it I think I know how it unfolded. The lead author had enough material to write his two main sections: ch 10, Geospatial Intrusion Detection, and ch 11, Visual Data Communications. He realized he couldn't publish a 115-page book, so he enlisted five contributing authors who wrote chapters on loosely related security topics. Finally the lead author wrote two introductory sections: ch 1, Network Overview, and ch 2, Infrastructure Monitoring. This publication-by-amalgamation method seldom yields coherent or helpful material, despite the superior production efforts of a company like Addison-Wesley. To put a point on PIA's trouble, there's only a single intrusion analyzed in the book, and it's in the lead author's core section. The end result is a book you can skip, although it would be good for chapters 4 and 10 to be published separately as digital "Short Cuts" on InformIT.
Chapters 1 and 2 are not needed. Anyone who needs to learn about networking can read a basic book already published. Ch 2 does mention that 802.1AE (if ever implemented) will hamper network traffic inspection, but you could read that online.
Ch 3 is odd because it begins by mentioning well-worn methods to evade network detection, followed by a discussion of the merits of Snort vs Bro. Someone who had to read the material in chapters 1 and 2 is not going to understand the Snort discussion, especially when it mentions byte_test, depth, regex, http_inspect, uricontent, Structured Exception Handlers, and 16 line Snort signatures. I liked seeing Bro mentioned, but the people who are going to be able to follow the sample Bro policy scripts on pages 75-78 are not the ones reading this book.
Ch 4 outlines several examples of writing signatures for Snort. This section is actually interesting, but you have to know Snort and certain advanced topics pretty well to get value from this section. Readers need to compensate for the far-too-small screenshots and lack of supporting details while reading the examples. Readers also need to figure out what the author is doing, such as when he sets up a client-side exploit against FlashGet by starting a malicious FTP server with flashget-overflow.pl. By the second example he's dropping warnings like "Had Core's advisory told you from where the size of the call to memcpy was coming, you might have to refine the signature to check for the appropriate behavior; unfortunately, the disassembly left out that argument:" [cue the ASM]. The bottom line with this chapter is this: know your audience, and write for them -- not your buddies. People who can follow contributions like this "at line speed" aren't going to read this book.
By ch 5 the "practical" aspect of this book has been left behind, with a discussion of "proactive intrusion prevention and response via attack graphs, which is really an academically-derived discussion of "topological vulnerability analysis." No one does this in the operational world, and no one will. Pages 143-144 talk about IDMEF, even though that specification died years ago. (There is still an independently-maintained -- as of Feb 09 -- Snort-IDMEF plugin. I don't know anyone in industry using it.)
Ch 6 is a generic overview of using network flows. The only new material is less than a page on IPFIX, which is just a table comparing that newer format with NetFlow. Ch 7 is called "Web Application Firewalls," but it's just an overview. Read Ivan Ristic's Apache Security or Ryan Barnett's Preventing Web Attacks with Apache if you want to know this topic. Ch 7 is titled "Wireless IDS/IPS," which is an even shallower overview than the previous topic. In none of these chapters do we have anything practical nor any intrusions analyzed. Ch 9 discusses physical security, but I didn't think it fit with the intended theme for the book.
I thought chapter 10 was interesting. Geospatial and visualization techniques do have a role in many operations, and ch 10 had the only example of an intrusion analysis. Unfortunately I don't think readers could take ch 10 and implement their own operational system. Ch 11 seemed irrelevant in light of the excellent visualization books by Raffy Marty and Greg Conti.
The book finishes with ch 12, Return on Investment: Business Justification. It was totally unnecessary: cite some regulations, list some breach costs, then compare ROI, NPV, and IRR. Talk a little about MSSPs and cyber liability insurance, then end. If you really want the best discussion of security costs, read Managing Cybersecurity Resources by Gordon and Loeb.
The subtitle for PIA is "Prevention and Detection for the Twenty-First Century." Readers will not find that in PIA. The lead author started with a kernel of a good idea, but the end result does not deliver enough real value to to readers. The lead author's material, and the chapter on Snort signature writing, could have been published as digital Short Cuts, or including in a compendium of chapters in a "survey" book. If you want to read a book intrusion analysis, you're more likely to be satisfied reading a book on intrusion forensics.
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"Practical Intrusion Analysis provides a solid fundamental overview of the art and science of intrusion analysis." –Nate Miller, Cofounder, Stratum SecurityThe Only Definitive Guide to New State-of-the-Art Techniques in Intrusion Detection and PreventionRecently, powerful innovations in intrusion detection and prevention have evolved in response to emerging threats and changing business environments. However, security practitioners have found little reliable, usable information about these new IDS/IPS technologies. In Practical Intrusion Analysis, one of the field's leading experts brings together these innovations for the first time and demonstrates how they can be used to analyze attacks, mitigate damage, and track attackers. Ryan Trost reviews the fundamental techniques and business drivers of intrusion detection and prevention by analyzing today's new vulnerabilities and attack vectors. Next, he presents complete explanations of powerful new IDS/IPS methodologies based on Network Behavioral Analysis (NBA), data visualization, geospatial analysis, and more.Writing for security practitioners and managers at all experience levels, Trost introduces new solutions for virtually every environment. Coverage includesAssessing the strengths and limitations of mainstream monitoring tools and IDS technologies
