High Technology Crime Investigator's Handbook: Working in the Global Information Environment [Paperback]

Don't have the book here right now so I can't tell the pages, but in the first few chapters I was told that acceptable use of fire arms (authors claim IT is just like fire arms as it can be used for good and bad) is a police killing an offender that might kill someone else (ever heard of the theory of deterrence?), that phreakers (i.e. those hacking telephone systems for free calls) are the major threat for global information infrastructure security, CERT archives are the major source of information for hackers, SATAN etc. (including outdated Crack) are significant hacker tools, WWW is just a number of screens connected to each other, being given only ping attack as an example of denial of service, spent pages on calculating how many books fit into hard drives of different sizes (Assumption was that a book contains almost 1000 pages, then it was reduced 500 pages, this book is around 300 pages), and was generally being subjected to a number of unjustified claims about computer crime and computer criminals that seem to be if not all wrong, at least so simple unlikely to educate anyone to understand crime in GII.

As I said, the book may improve but I am not intending on finding out. The US centricity doesn't help, either. I'd rather get back to other sources of computer crime information that are more accurate and comprehensive.

Luckily, there are a number of good books around. For an introduction to computer crime, I recommend Icove, Seger and VonStorch: Computer Crime, A Crime Fighter's handbook (O'Reilly and Associates 1995). For a number of case studies and examples of computer crime, get Denning's Information Warfare and Security (Addison-Wesley 1999). For the scope of economical espionage and information warfare capacities of countries other than US Check Adams's The Next World War (Arrow Books Limited, 1998). To properly understand that national information infrastructure, nations' dependence on it and inherent vulnerabilities, get your hands on to Schneider's (ed.) Trust in Cyberspace (National Academy Press, 1999). If you want to know the extent of computer crime, go to CSI/FBI computer crime survey online.

It is widely assumed that law enforcement personnel is not properly educated to handling computer crime. If this is the case, authors should be especially carefull to treat security technology and vulnerabilities appropriately. Simplifications and unjustified assumptions don't help much. Therefore, it's better spend time on the above books and WWW site and get a more comprehensive picture of computer crime.