Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity

Scott Pinzon writes "Writing sonnets, screenplays, or an epic poem in your third language is a breeze compared to the toughest of art forms, didactic fiction. That might explain why the various chapters of Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity range from appalling to exciting. Whether you see the glass of STN: Identity as half empty or half full depends on whether this is your cup of poison -- but on a technical level, it rocks." Read on for the rest of Pinzon's review. Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity author Raven Alder, Jay Beale, Riley "Caezar" Eller, Brian Hatch, Chris Hurley (Roamer), Jeff Moss, Ryan Russell, Tom Parker, Timothy Mullen, Johnny Long pages 336 publisher Syngress rating 6 reviewer Scott Pinzon ISBN 1597490067 summary Fiction that teaches about network security

Slashdotters have a distinguished history of calling b.s. on fiction authors who get technical details wrong. (My recent favorite is Jeffrey Deaver's jargon-in-a-blender paragraphs in The Blue Nowhere, where a computer expert can't break a hacker's defenses because "I can't decrypt his firewall!") But what happens when the problem is reversed? Can authors with awesome technical credentials, but little literary background, teach by using story?

And these authors do have impeccable Internet security cred. Many of them are stars circling the firmament of Black Hat and Defcon; senior penetration testers; former consultants to No Such Agency; authors of popular books on security; and so on.

Thus, STN: Identity describes attacks with accuracy and depth. The light veneer of fiction gives the networking tips real-world context. (On this point, I agree with Blain Hilton, who reviewed the first STN volume for Slashdot.) Sure, you've heard of all kinds of hacker tools, but do you know exactly when an attacker would use, say, Metasploit Framework, and not Knoppix? Chris Hurley's chapter, "Saul on the Run," stands out in this regard, showing how a black hatter uses social engineering and numerous tools to get a valid birth certificate for someone else, and exactly how an attacker can intrude on a secured wireless residential network to explore private information.

Another stand-out chapter is Johnny "Google Hacker" Long's "Death by a Thousand Cuts." This rambling episode follows, in part, a forensic cop's efforts to make a disc image of an iPod found at a crime scene. The trouble is, Apple's drivers spring into action whenever the iPod senses it has connected to a computer. If the driver activity changes anything in the iPod, all evidence on it will be inadmissible in court. In unraveling this challenge, STN became so fascinating, I couldn't put it down. Which made showering awkward.

Brian Hatch's chapter, "Bl@ckTo\/\/3r," stood out to me, also, but for the opposite reason: almost all of it went over my head. I thought I had accepted Unix into my heart, but I'm not disciple enough to keep up with Hatch's treatise on X11. Where I thought Hatch was talking only to himself, I had a more senior network security expert read the chapter, and he considered it well written. YMMV.

Other chapters cover basic crypto and code-breaking; how to forge cards that will fool magnetic stripe readers; the dark side of biometric authentication; uses of a Faraday cage; making a QWERTY keyboard type Dvorak letters, and just lots and lots of good undergroundy badness. The technical lessons hold tightly to the stated theme of identity theft. Any network administrator could learn a lot about the enemy's techniques from this volume; and, because of the story-driven format, probably even remember them.

But I've been dodging my opening question: does the fiction part work? Before I answer, I should mention that I've written a lot of fiction. I've had four books of fiction and 60 short stories published, and studied under the editor who removed 500 pages from Stephen King's The Stand. I'm not saying I'm good at writing fiction; I'm just saying I respect the craft. So, can STNs authors write fiction? No. No, they cannot.

STN: Identity reads like a catalog of beginning-fiction-writer mistakes, from misspellings and homophones (from Chapter 5: "He called me a Windows administrator, and it wasn't a complement") to characters with no feelings or personality. In Chapter 8, where college students decide to 0wn Hushmail's DNS servers for a man-in-the-middle attack, they work 36 hours straight without a smart remark, a crabby comeback, or, really, any dialog except ad hoc lectures on network architecture. Fiction-wise, it's as if Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys tried hacking. And a couple of the chapters go so far past "wordy" that they're almost the verbal equivalent of running in place. If you're in a hurry to get to the technical meat [Jedi hand wave], these are not the authors you want. With that said, I admit that some of the chapters clamber all the way up to "adequate." But remember, fiction that teaches is hard for anyone to pull off.

Maybe none of that matters. Is anyone looking for deathless prose when picking up a book subtitled "How to Own an Identity"? Nah. What matters is, the various authors lay down some seriously tricky attacks. If you are more geek than lit critic, the coolness factor is off the charts. If you like to spend your time reading and thinking about network security and hacking, this is for you. And if you still buy into the "romance" of hacker shenanigans, STN can be your little Defcon-away-from-Defcon.

So is this wildly uneven book worth the price? For fiction lovers, no. For white hat security aficionados, yes. For black hat security aficionados, buying it will be the last purchase you make on your own credit card -- so hell yes. #

Full disclosure: I am not personal friends with any of the authors, but I've interviewed a few of them, including the book's technical editor, Timothy Mullen, for my day job. I may also suffer from envy that my own attempts to fictionalize network security have been ignored by most of the world except German Tom's Hardware.

Scott Pinzon, CISSP, is Editor-in-Chief for WatchGuard's LiveSecurity Service, and writes about network security on the free RSS news feed WatchGuard Wire. You can purchase Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.