Slashdot Mirror
Stealing the Network
I'm leery of books that are written by multiple authors because the writing style always seems to keep me off beat from jumping around, however in this book it works out well since the book is organized as a series of short stories. Each story describes somebody involved in information security -- either somebody trying to access a system, or a person trying to keep the bad guys out.
If you are looking for a step-by-step guide to locking down your computer and network, this is not the book for you. Instead, this book is more to help people who already have at least a basic understanding of information security to see from another perspective. Stealing the Network looks at other reasons why people can break in: everything from being told to go to industry conferences to not collecting access cards when an employee leaves the company. What this book left deepest in my mind is to trust nothing, and assume even less.
After the ten short stories of how hacking is really done, there is a nicely done appendix along with Ryan Russel's "Laws of Security," which finishes this fictionalized book in a very non-fictional way. The laws cover most of the problems with current IT infrastructure, but do not go in-depth with what I believe is the biggest security hole, the user. Many of the stories touch on this fact but that's about the extent of it. I believe this may be because there are not any easy solutions to human behavior. This book says it best with "people are lazy."
At 328 pages (in pretty large text), this is a great easy read, though the book would be better with a lower price tag. However if you work with or around computers and the Internet, this book is very enlightening, if not completely informative.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Forward
- Chapters:
- Hide and Sneak
- The Worm Turns
- Just Another Day at the Office
- h3X's Adventures in Networkland
- The Thief No One Saw
- Flying the Friendly Skies
- dis-card
- Social (In)Security
- BabelNet
- The Art of Tracking
- Appendix - The Laws of Security
Most of the book's authors have websites you can hit for more information; follow these links to find more from Ryan Russell, Tim Mullen (Thor), FX, Dan Kaminsky, Joe Grand, Ken Pfeil, Ido Dubrawsky and Mark Burnett, as well as Jeff Moss (who wrote the forward).
You can purchase Stealing the Network from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
One of my books finally made it onto Slashdot. I wrote the "Worm Turns" chapter with Tim Mullen, acted as tech editor for the book, and wrote the overall outline. Pretty easy book to be a tech editor on. I'll be watching this thread if there are any questions I can answer.
A whole book review that consists of the Contents listing, and a whole paragraph that says "I liked the writing style, even though it was written by more than one person." Gee thanks. Next time save your time and just give us a link direct to the Amazon listing why not?
here is the Amazon Link.
;)
I'm always wary of amazon reviews anyhow though, half the time their anonymous and most likely the publishers, authors, and editors. With my lack of trust does that mean I'm as knowledgeable as I would be from reading the book ?
Fear Breeds Knowledge
"You can purchase Stealing the Network from bn.com"
Or from Amazon
Insert secret Slash affilate number here
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I downloaded this as an ebook from syngress its cheaper :)
The stories were all well written, covered a varied amount of subjects and were not heavily technical.
Hope to see more books take this different angle, the only one that seemed to be written the same style recently was Art of deception.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
...while I was waiting to see TM:R. I started reading it, and in half an hour was through fifty pages already. It was compelling, to say the least.
:)
The reviewer is quite correct - this book is different from most normal security books. Instead of "here's the attack, here's how to defend", it is a collection of fictional stories. Since I only read the first one, I can't comment on the rest of them, but the first was enough to make me want to read the rest.
Needless to say, when I got home that night, I ordered it. Since then, I've been like Calvin waiting for his red beanie - every evening I come home and it's not there... but the next day I am psyched that it will be! (It should be arriving today! I am quite anxious to read the rest.)
My recommendation is that you check it out if you get a chance.
libertarianswag.com
...a book I read long ago, that was supposedly a novelized true story about how a network administrator "catched" a hacker. Unfortunately I don't remember its title nor the author, but I expect somebody here will remember the scene where the guy melts his sneakers in the microwave, because he wanted to quick dry them... :-)
Does it ring a bell?
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Too true, it was zammechat how much dobby Nadsat was learned while reading "A Clockwork Orange". I once saw some real foreign language books start in English and gradually incorporate another language, wish I could get hold of something like that now.
Another novel about software engineering is The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom De Marco, author of the classic text, Peopleware. As the title indicates, it's a novel that not-so-subtly illustrates certain points about project management. I haven't read it as rumours indicate the romantic aspects are a bit average, but amazon reviewers seem positive.
Further afield, another educational book is
The Richest Man in Babylon, a fable which attempts to demonstrate, albeit in a crude way, the how and why of saving $$$.
Any others?
All--
;-) This gets mentioned in Dubrawsky's attack tree analysis -- an extremely systematic breakdown of attack selection across pretty much every platform an attacker might find.
:-) And of course, it wouldn't be FX without seeing those HP Laserjets as covert outposts :-)
:-)
:-)
Thought it'd be fun to talk about some of the more interesting material we put together throughout the book:
--HTTP-only access to the outside world doesn't actually pose much of a barrier...httptunnel (the original web service) may not be as mindbending as IP-over-DNS or mailtunnel, but damned if it doesn't punch ssh sessions bidirectionally through web proxies
--Worm analysis. Guys, Code Red and Nimda were astonishingly successful; there's not-so-idle speculation that Nimda was a test run from a foreign intelligence service. One of my good friends did almost nothing for a year but manage Nimda recovery. Just because it left the press doesn't mean it left the network. Reverse Engineering is never trivial (unless you're Halvar Flake and dream in x86); throw extreme time sensitivity, malicious design, and financial implications and you get an idea of the world virus fighters and worm smashers have to face. Kudos to Tim Mullen and Ryan Russell for their nuts-and-bolts breakdown of this process.
--Joe Grand. Software-based RF Analyzer. Pre-GSM/GPRS Blackberry transmissions. Mobitex.exe. And if that wasn't enough, "Creating a fake gelatin finger to bypass a biometric fingerprint sensor.", complete with photographs.
--Ah, FX. Leave the poor Cisco alone, man
--Security and Functionality tend to play in opposition...as Paul Craig points out, maybe those step-by-step guides to getting through the VPN shouldn't show up on Google
--WiFi. Dead horse. But it's nice to see it anyway.
--Password cracking by calling up administrators and listening to them type in their password -- nice, Mark. I'd like to see some of the stats code to manage that. Also good to see Windows Proxy Autodetection getting some misexposure.
--Auditors are given lots of leeway. No, let Ken Pfiel clarify...those who claim to be auditors are given lots of leeway.
--OK, I'm a protocol geek. For a good time, switch to root and type:
"tcpdump -w - -s65535 | strings --bytes-8"
If it's ugly, it's SMB. If it's scary, you're probably at Network Interop, where there's 220 access points and you're sniffing across all of them.
--Scanrand docs! Portscan detection on switched networks by watching the router spew an ARP storm! "If your SMTP server has teleported 15 hops closer than the rest of your host, perhaps it's being hijacked by your hotel." And more NAT games.
--Collaborating on tracking down an attacker, while the attacker can read your email...fun.
We've had some fun, to say the least.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
A common (and probably fair) complaint. If you shop around a bit you may find it for slightly less.
Syngress books tend to be priced a bit higher than some of the competition. They seem to be happy doing a little less volume at a little more margin. They're also a small publisher, so they don't neccessarily have the same economics of scale or influence that a big publisher does.
The whole book industry is interesting, from what relatively little I know about it.
Wonder what would have happened if Guthenberg was allowed to take a patent (don't think that particularly concept existed at that time) off his invention of the printing press.
...sometimes in perpetuity).
... authors had no rights at all, until the Statue of Anne was passed almost a century later, and practically still had no rights until the Statue of Anne was enforced by a court case several decades after that.
... one that was immediately addressed with software patents and, when that failed to quell the innovation quickly enough, draconian copyright laws such as the world hasn't seen since before copyright's relative liberalisation under the Statue of Anne).
... a sad state of affairs that exists to this day, if you substitute USPTO for the crown). However, based upon the chilling effects being observed today, and our knowledge of the importance the printing press played in political and cultural changes in Europe that led to the enlightenment and modern scientific collaboration, among other things, it is safe to day that a 20 (or perpetual) delay might well have tipped the scales sufficiently in favor of the entrenched powers so as to make any such reforms very difficult, at least, and perhaps impossible.
What would have happened? The patent would have expired 14 years later, that's what (28 years if he bothered to renew it). Net effect on society: probably about zero, because technology didn't spread very quickly.
If you are going to defend the current system of government monopoly entitlements, you should at least learn to differentiate between copyright law and patent law. While the two do bear similiarities in their stifling of human creativity and economic endeavor, they are not the same, and their consiquences, while often similiar, are not the same. Certainly the duration of their respective monopolies are not at all similiar. Patent law grants monopoly entitlements for 20 years on human knowledge. Copyrights grant monopoly entitlements for 95 years, or life plus 75 years, on human expression and information.
In your comment above, you are confusing copyright law (as it was implimented in the United States after the revolutionary war, with its 14 year expiration + optionally an additional 14 years) with patent law (which had a 17 year expiration and now has a 20 year expiration, in the US, but was in other jurisdiction granted for much longer
Copyright in England was perpetual in its initial incarnation, and offered publishers only exclusive rights
What would have happened is that the printing press would have spread much more slowly during its initial 'craze', giving governments and the Church more lead time in devising effective methods of censorship. Things like the reformation might never have happened in such an environment, where 20 years could have been the difference from a disruptive technology allowing exposure of a new idea ("let's all read and interpret the Bible for ourselves, rather than being spoonfed our opinions from Rome") and an emerging technology so controlled as to be reduced to a tool of the entrenched power ologopolies (sound familiar? It should: that is how everything from the telephone and radio to television and aerospace work today. The Internet was a surprising phenomenon
It is difficult to know with certainty what chilling effect a 20 year patent (or a patent in perpetuity, as was the norm at the time patents were first being offered as Royal rewards for innovation, often to those who had brought the innovation to the crown and not to those who actually did the innovating and inventing
Which really should give one pause. How many similiar, much needed changes and reforms have been quelled by slowing down and ultimately suppressing emerging technologies. What is it that threatens free software and the internet more than anything else? You guessed it, copyright law on the one side as wielded by the media cartels, and patent l
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
BTW, sample chapter if anyone wants to see.