Customer Reviews

Counter Hack Reloaded: A Step-by-Step Guide to Computer Attacks and Effective Defenses

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This has got to be one of the best books that I've read on computer security, hands down. Ed obviously put a great deal of time and creativity into designing a book that would give a system/network administrator exactly what s/he needs to do useful computer security work: a solid understanding of the fundamentals. He follows that up with excellent descriptions and tutorials on the hacking process, including tools and techniques. I loved Ed's introductory chapters, titled "Pretty Much Everything You Need to Know about {"TCP/IP","Windows NT/2000", "Unix"} to Follow the Rest of This Book, in N pages or Less." This was just an incredibly good idea. It provides a great introduction to what you need if you're new to this. It also provides great review on material that you might use every day but need to remember or understand more deeply. And, once you finish these, you're ready to learn about hacking/auditting tools and techniques. Now, Ed takes a much *better* approach than most of the other books coming out today: for every tool, technique, or topic, he works to help you understand it very deeply. For example, most books include a short description of a tool, possibly accompanied by a table listing its command-line options. Ed takes the opposite approach -- he explains the tool's use and functionality in the right amount of detail and describes how the tool works, turning you into an instant power-user for every tool you use! I knew this book got it right when I saw 17 pages on Fyodor's nmap (the premier network mapping and scanning tool) -- to truly use nmap effectively, you've got to understand what it is that you're doing. The whole book shows this strong attention to exactly the right amount of focus on each topic and it shows. This is one of the best designed well-written books on computer security that I've read in a while. If you don't buy anything else on network auditting or penetration testing, buy this book!

This book is required reading for at least one of my information security management courses at my college. I haven't even read half of it, but I can say, with confidence, that it's already proven more useful than anything I learned in my five years of doing university-level computer science. The only thing it does not do is teach you how to hack a computer, at least not in the sense of what being a hacker means. It would definitely help you on your way of becoming a script kiddie, though!

Overall, highly recommended, it's a no doubt five stars quality book. Even though I borrowed this book from library, I just place an order to purchase my own copy. Excellent reference material!

This book covers two major parts: (1) All-you-need-to-know Overviews, and (2) Hacking Skills. Ed only takes about 20% of his entire book portion for giving readers the overview of all important knowledge such as Networking,Unix & Windows. For those overviews chapters, they are all well-written and extremely easy to follow even for complicated concepts. By themselves, they already worth the book value, and they're excellent for refreshing those key & important knowledge & concepts.

The second part of the book mainly addresses various hacking approaches. The contents are exactly same as Ed's desktop seminar 'The Hack Counter-Hack Training Course', which is a computer-based training video on CD-ROM. However, this book provides much more details and in-depth explanation on how-things-done. Again, it's really well-written to depict the complicated hacking techniques. If you purchase the Ed's The Hack Counter-Hack Training Course, I strongly recommend you to buy this book as your reference material. They should go in pair.

I got a copy back in November 2001, but the book still deserves all the praise. It simply shows that a well-written infosec book doesn't have to be "fresh" or to be in the umpteenth edition to be fun and useful.

It has all the components of a great book: logical presentation style, wide material coverage from concepts to command line switches, humor, plenty of details on attacks and defenses.

The book presents a typical attack sequence (from recon to maintaining access) and goes into details on all its stages. A distinctive feature of the book is that the security tools descriptions are present not as the "man page rephrase" (a senseless stream of options and parameters), but instead woven into the fabric of the attack flow, thus making it much more interesting.

The book is focused more on the attack side, while containing small tips on protecting and blocking various described attacks. I also liked author's coverage of UNIX rootkits. Another awesome part of the book is three scenarios in the end. I was lucky to be present when then author presented the "Monstrous Software" attack case (#3 in the book) at the seminar and it was just as hilarious as it was enlightening.
Overall, the book is still a very useful addition to any security book library. Perhaps a second edition is in the works, Ed? More web attacks, novel application hacking and wireless stuff will sure come handy.

Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH is a Senior Security Analyst with a major information security company. His areas of infosec expertise include intrusion detection, UNIX security, forensics, honeypots, etc. In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org

Good book dinamic and simple. it does not use complicated words and easy to fallow.

I am an MCSE who recently inherited several Linux machines do to downsizing at my company. I purchased several books to help me shore up my unix security knowledge. First I read Hacking Linux Exposed because it is 100% Linux specific, and followed with this book.Counter Hack covers a huge range of security problems much better than anything else I've read. It not only reinforced the concepts from Hacking Linux, but taught me many thing from the Windows world that I didn't know, in spite of my previous training.I really appreciated the instructions to fix and avoid problems. I'd recommend this book over "Hacking Exposed, 3rd Edition" any day. If you have unix machines, I'd purchase "Hacking Linux Exposed" too. In fact, I'd love to see what Skoudis and Hatch could write if they collaberated.

After reading the introduction chapter, you get excited and think that this book might actually be some what different than any other hacking book on the market. It really isn't.

If you have experience, the first 144 pages are a complete waste.
The author provides a review of TCP/IP, Unix and NT in 144 pages.

I have no doubt that the author is a seasoned professional. He even makes mention of the fact that he provides advice to the groups of authors who make the SANS security publications. Maybe he does, but this book is not written very well.

If you actually read this entire book, you'll find yourself
saying "I've read this somewhere else". Don't get me wrong, buy the book only if you have not read other security books. There are others that you should get before you read this one.

This book really exposes what hacking is all about. It takes the mystery out of how attackers actually penetrate systems and the tools that they used. After reading for the first time, I have a good understanding of how attacks work. I plan on reading a second time to put all the pieces together and may delve deeper into the tools that they use. There are so many links that after the first 50 pages I stopped bookmarking and decided to review later. Bottomline, a great book for the money.

Akhou sha7ta,this easy-to-use, step-by-step guide will empower network and system administrators to defend their information and computing assets-whether or not they have security experience. In Counter Hack, leading network security expert Edward Skoudis presents comprehensive, insider's explanations of today's most destructive hacker tools and tactics-and specific, proven countermeasures for both UNIX and Windows environments.

Whatever your role in protecting network infrastructure and data, Counter Hack delivers proven solutions you can implement right now and long-term strategies that will improve security for years to come.

I decided to purchase this book based in large part on the fact that all the reviews at the time I was shopping gave it 5 stars. I was also looking for something that seemed a good introduction without being either totally non-technical or overwhelming technical.

I'm well into the book now and can tell you that it definitely lives up to all those 5 star ratings. As others have said, it is an easy, enjoyable, and very informative read. Depending on your ultimate objectives you may eventually want to get even deeper into the technical aspects of security but for starters and for a good long term reference this book is excellent.

Buy it. You won't be disappointed.