Hacking Linux Exposed, Second Edition

David Schaffter writes "I bought Hacking Linux Exposed when it first came out. What struck me about it at the time was that it was unlike the other hacking books that were out there. Most seemed to play on the hacker craze, and were essentially lists of cracks. Hacking Exposed, presumably the model for HLE, was very much like this. Topical, overblown, and in the end it was outdated by the time you got it." Read on to see what David finds has changed (or not) in the second edition. Hacking Linux Exposed, Second Edition author Brian Hatch, James Lee pages 720 publisher Osborne McGraw-Hill rating 10 reviewer David Schaffter ISBN 0072225645 summary This second edition of the best selling Hacking Linux Exposed shows you in great detail how to secure your Linux box - or break into one.

HLE on the other hand was much more like a good textbook -- it taught you how to think about security, to see how each problem was caused and how to combat them. As the years went by, my copy of HLE was still as useful as it was the day I got it. For this reason, I was skeptical what they could put into a second edition -- the first seemed to stand the passage of time just fine.

Nonetheless, I bought it, and was surprised to find that the second edition is even stronger than the first, yet they have made it still work on its own -- you don't need to buy the first edition to have a complete understanding of Linux security. You should probably read their reviews page which has links to reviews of the original, as well as the Slashdot review from last time which have detailed breakdowns of what you'll find. I'll concentrate on the changes in this review.

The new edition deprecates or cuts a lot of old material that is no longer applicable -- the emphasis is on OpenSSH configuration vulnerabilities, rather than RLogin/RSH/etc, for example, which is fine since no Linux system comes with Rlogin installed by default any more. The second edition is 100 actual pages longer, but due to the condensing of old material, it's effectively 200 pages longer at least. They took out some of the material that isn't needed in the paper copy and put it online too, which was a great idea.

So, from my perspective, here are the noticeable differences:

• More tools are covered in detail -- Exim gets equal play with Sendmail and friends, DJBDNS gets covered as much as BIND. (For configuration, that is. Nothing can match BIND for vulnerabilities.)

• There's a whole new Denial and Distributed Denial of Service chapter, that covers the gamut - much more than just your simple TCP-connect floods.

• There are three new chapters about post-system-compromise tricks the crackers will play on you, showing you exactly what kind of things you'll need to clean up if they get in. This stuff was absolutely amazing, and the authors could probably write a whole book on this if they wanted to.

• More distribution-specific information.

• Step-by-step instructions on how to patch and rebuild your kernel using the existing kernel configuration parameters, detailed enough that any newbie could do it. They have specific variants for Red Hat and Debian as well.

• The best discussion of network-based attacks (ARP spoofing, Man-in-the-middle, session hijacking, etc) in any book, anywhere. You could easily use the stuff in this chapter to take over Windows machines too.

• More custom tools and code than before.

• Just passing references to things like the Morris worm, the Ping of death, ipfwadm, and other hacks and tools that are so old and irrelevant today that they shouldn't be discussed in depth any more. They get their nod, but the authors spend quality time with things of current relevance only, rather than wasting the space just to make the book look thick.

• Even more integration with the website.

That last one needs a bit of explanation. Brian Hatch, the lead author of HLE, has a weekly security newsletter called Linux Security: Tips, Tricks, and Hackery. (You can read the article archives or subscribe.) These often have very detailed implementation instructions, such as installing DJBDNS and migrating away from BIND, using /proc to investigate cracker activities, and occasionally has contests too.

The nice thing is that Hatch has built up a body of free online instructions, and thus rather than copy and pasting them into HLE, he can point to the online articles from within the book. This saves lots of paper, and keeps you focused on the goal of the book -- to learn attack methodologies and how to stop them.

One thing that these guys prove in their book is that "code is speech." Rather than having wordy passages such as "The user then needs to run the command 'nc client-ip-address 80' on server 'freddie' from the /etc/ directory where client-ip-address is the actual ip address of the target, and type ..." they show it all through a command-line view, embedding this extra location and user information in the prompts and formatting (bold/italics/etc) like this

jdoe@freddie:/etc$ nc client_ip 80
GET /some/web/page
<head><title>This is some web page</title>
...

They always show you what's actually going on behind the scenes -- an actual SMTP or POP conversation for example -- so you know how things really work, rather than living in a black box where Nessus says "vulnerable" and you don't know how to determine it on your own.

Here's a very quick table of contents:

• Part I: Linux Security Overview
  • Chapter 1 -- Linux Security Overview
  • Chapter 2 -- Proactive Security Measures
  • Chapter 3 -- Mapping Your Machine and Network

• Part II: Breaking In from the Outside
  • Chapter 4 -- Social Engineering, Trojans, and Other Cracker Trickery
  • Chapter 5 -- Physical Attacks
  • Chapter 6 -- Attacking over the Network
  • Chapter 7 -- Advanced Network Attacks

• Part III: Local User Attacks
  • Chapter 8 -- Elevating User Privileges
  • Chapter 9 -- Linux Authentication

• Part IV: Server Issues
  • Chapter 10 -- Mail Security
  • Chapter 11 -- File Transfer Protocol Security
  • Chapter 12 -- Web Servers and Dynamic Content
  • Chapter 13 -- Access Control and Firewalls
  • Chapter 14 -- Denial of Service Attacks

• Part V: After a Break-In
  • Chapter 15 -- Covert Access
  • Chapter 16 -- Back Doors
  • Chapter 17 -- Advanced System Abuse

• Part VI: Appendixes
  • Appendix A -- Discovering and Recovering from an Attack
  • Appendix B -- Keeping Your Programs Current
  • Appendix C -- Turning Off Unneeded Software
  • Appendix D -- Case Studies

The HackingLinuxExposed.com website has a more complete list of contents, as well as a sample chapter.

The other nice thing is the authors have put all their source code, tools, and example cracks online for free download, released under the GPL. You may notice that you need to type a password to get in, but if you have half a hacking cell in your body, you'll find that the authors think a password requirement is stupid as we do.

If I could change one thing about this book, it would be the risk ratings. These are the dumbest things I've seen. These are little boxes at the beginning of each 'Attack' that list three values: "Popularity", "Simplicity" and "Impact." It then averages these and comes up with a risk rating. Since all the Hacking Exposed books have them, I can only assume it was a requirement of the publisher -- I don't know if Hatch and Lee care for them one bit, but I can tell you I find them useless. (Of course, I give this book a 10 in spite of this fact.)

These numbers are presented as quantitative, but it can't possibly be. I can argue giving many different values in each category, so what does this actually tell us? For example take open X11 servers. Impact could be 10 because you could type a root password that's intercepted, or it could be 7 because it only gives you user-level access. Popularity could be 3 if you say most people don't set it up this way, or you could say it's 9 because many crackers look for open servers. I'd rather they just used impact, gave it a scale of 1-10 and were done with it. The popularity and simplicity factors override the impact in too many cases to make the final value anything but specious.

Aside from that drawback, which is easily ignored, the book is absolutely solid.

When I was about to buy my copy, I noticed that the authors are donating all online proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so you should order through their website, regardless what the Slashdot link may be. ;-)

In my opinion, there's no Linux user who should be without this book. It's 720 pages of answers you need to keep yourself secure from the blackhats, or 720 pages of ways to become a blackhat yourself, depending on your ethical alignment. Either way, you won't be able to put it down, except to type as you follow along.

If David did not convince you otherwise, you can purchase Hacking Linux Exposed, Second Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Volume 2

[von Prufer]

Volume 2 looks to be just as good:

Hacking Slashdot Exposed - covering such essentials as changing the proper story icon to the AMD logo and frustrating trolls by not allowing them to comment for 20 minutes.

Re:Except that it should be called...

[Latent IT]

And a good example of a crack is the sound that comes from using that same lamp to bust you across your smug, self-righteous face.

Seriously, is that the best you've got? Shit, I've got a reason to be this smug, then.