3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and Provocative Story, Feb 16 2006
By John Coale - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels (Paperback)
"Hacking a Terror Network" tells a convincing tale of Cyber Terrorism. This fictional story uses communication technology readily available today to spin a fascinating tale a potential scenarios for any criminal element and easy enough for the novice computer user. By combining emotional motivation and computer savvy, terrorist threats press US counterterrorism teams to keep ahead of electronic means of causing death and destruction.
The only thing missing are sidebars describing instructional exercises for the reader to try out these easily used technologies.
The reader might enjoy supplementing this book with another Syngress book, Zero-Day Exploit, to continue reading cyber terrorism scenarios.
The author talks about applications to use and you don't even have to google them on the internet. They're included on the accompanying CD. Additionally, Syngress gives you 4 free e-booklets online.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good intro to stenography and its uses., Dec 5 2005
By G. Tairov - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels (Paperback)
I found this book to be interesting both as a fiction and technical material. The plot develops around a very hot topic of these days - the war on terrorism. Unlike your "conventional" terrorists, the characters in this book use Internet and computer technology to secretly plan and launch an attack against the US.
The tools discussed in this book were new to me, although I've heard of something similar in the past. I found it difficult at times to adjust to this interesting combination of suspense fiction and the technical explanations of how certain tools work. However, overall information obtained is quite useful and encouraged me to further research the topic of "covert channels" and stenography. Besides a few grammar errors and typos that were missed by the editors, this is a good introduction to stenography, especially for computer enthusiasts and professionals. If you are looking for a page turner fiction novel you may want to look somewhere else.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
On The Internet They Won't Know You Are a Dog, July 16 2005
By Christopher Byrne "The Business Controls Caddy" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels (Paperback)
There are some important topics in cyber-security that are very important, but may not require an entire book to cover in detail. When it comes to online communication using "covert channels" and "stegenography", Syngress does what is excels at: they cover the topic in the context of a fictionalized narrative to give it a "real world" context. While not as excellent as some of their other efforts in this genre, Syngress still does a good, but not perfect, job with Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels (364 pages , SYNGRESS, 2005, ISBN 1-928994-98-9).
The context of this book is a revenge-motivated terrorist attack, borne out of the first Gulf War, against targets on the United States. Some might question how realistic the scenario is or is not, but the book weaves a story which may ring all too true today. The threat of terrorism is real, and it could/would be too easy for people with evil purposes to use covert channels to plan and coordinate an attack.
Without giving away a surprising plot twist, it is hard to envision how the scenario lain out in this book could be realistic, but then again no one on the streets envisioned 9-11 or the recent bombings in London either. What Rogers does in this book is effectively explain the different types of covert channels that can be used, tools that are readily available to use the channels, and tools that are available to detect their use. He also demonstrates that how, without a stroke of luck, it may be virtually impossible to detect the use of these channels.
The book is not written as tautly as it could be and at times you might want to say "Just get to the point!". And there are some items in the book, such as the presence of an Internet Cafe in Iraq in 1991, that require as they say in Hollywood, the "willful suspension of disbelief". Put these things aside and you will learn some new things and technologies you may not have known about before.
The bottom line is that without luck, nobody on the Internet will know you are a dog.
The Scorecard
Par on an Average Par 4