Cyber Spying Tracking Your Family's (Sometimes) Secret Online Lives [Paperback]

Most people in the computer field have been asked once or twice to "help me find out what my kids are doing" or "help me see who my spouse is chatting with at night". I bought this book mostly out of curiosity to see what tricks the authors might have since they all used to work for the CIA. Besides just the technical side, it is pretty funny. I think everyone has known a "Dirty Larry" before. I think this is the first nerd book I bought that actually had me rolling on the floor laughing in parts. The quote for chapter 9 is classic.

Chapters1/2 were good thought provokers and kind of get you into the spying mindset.

I personally found Chapters 3/4/5 to be a little introductory, but I am certain that anyone that is not a computer professional will need them.

Chapter 6 was great; I had no idea that you could get passwords out of microsoft's protected storage like that. It was neat because you could actually step through every example. The Google desktop information was muy cool too. That for sure is the perfect spy tool, you can even use the nice google interface to search chat/email/AND webpages. All the VNC info was great. I showed my girlfriend how you can remotely "watch" someone and access their desktop and she was amazed.

Chapters 7/8/9 very cool and just as they described, you learn how to spy on web traffic, email, and chat messages. The cell phone location spying in chapter 10 was neat. I had never thought about doing that, and the best part of 11 was the iPod trick on page 380. Thank you for that one.

The only bad thing is that I wish the book came with a CD of all the tools they used. That would have been great. Maybe in the next release? Otherwise it is kind of a pain searching around for all of them.

This is not a book about security and defending yourself from spying but the basics of why one might consider spying on other members of their family. Whether because they suspect infidelity, criminal activity or some other concern there are a lot of reasons why people might want to find out what others are doing on their computer. A very important point made in the beginning of the book is the question of the ethics of spying including the effect it has on the trust of a relationship. The authors also point out that sometimes spying is much less of an ethical consideration. Sometimes it might be part of protecting your children from online predators or other real dangers.

The book covers the basics of spying including creating a plan, getting the right software or hardware to implement the plan and actual implementation. The authors do a good job of pointing out how we leave tracks behind and how to get rid of those tracks as well as how to exploit them.

Written for the novice user it starts at the very beginning with things like how to open the command prompt and running explorer. From there it goes on to look at more basic as well as intermediate level techniques. The authors even include information on some rather advanced software such as ethereal (one of my personal favorites). It does give you a solid understanding of what the different software is capable of doing but really doesn't provide a thorough treatment of any of them. In the case of Ethereal and Snort both have complete books written about how to use them effectively so obviously part of a chapter barely scratches the surface of what can be done.

For the most part it teaches the easier ways of finding out information without using difficult advanced tools. It includes how to access areas where passwords, usernames, etc. are stored as well as directories and files that do not show up in explorer unless you know how to hand-enter the path to them.

Whether you are spying on someone's web browsing, e-mail, internet chat, or instant messaging the basics are all here. They even include information on how to remove evidence of your activities and ways to tell if you are being watched.

These techniques are mainly for local network spying and not for use over the Internet. Although still subject to many ethical and other considerations, for the purpose of finding out what is going on within your local network Cyber Spying is highly recommended.

This is an unusual book, it clearly lays out espionage technique, a bit of information security and information technology theory. Then they go into the how to do it.

If you have kids and computers, this is a must read. My wife and I really struggled with the idea of respecting our kids privacy and so we set up the minimum possible monitoring at our house and tried to ensure our kid was briefed on internet safety. Even so, our son was approached on the Internet at age 15 by a grown woman that wanted to meet him in real life. I am glad we detected that before anything really serious happened. Kids need a chance to grow up without that kind of help from adults.

Finally, it must be noted that anything this book teaches could be used in the workplace as well. Managers should read Cyber Spying to understand what is possible.