Customer Reviews

Stealing The Network: How to Own the Box

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Target Audience
Anyone with an interest in network security and wants to look into the mind of a network cracker/hacker.

Contents
This book is mostly a series of fictional stories written in first-person narrative on what happens during a network attack or an investigation into an attack.

The book is divided into the following chapters: Hide And Seek; The Worm Turns; Just Another Day At The Office; h3X's Adventures In Networkland; The Thief No One Saw; Flying The Friendly Skies; dis-card; Social (in)Security; BabelNet; The Art Of Tracking; The Laws Of Security

Review
All too often the topic of network security becomes an academic exercise, until it's too late. Companies might know what they should do, and they might even think they are beyond attack. But to a motivated person, your system may be nothing more than swiss cheese. Stealing The Network takes you beyond the technical and into the psychology of an attack.

Stealing The Network is a series of fictional stories about network attacks of various sorts. Hide And Seek is an attack on a company's network by a person upset with poor customer service. He steals a credit card file and posts it for others to use. The Worm Turns is an all-night hacking session to dissect the latest internet virus and post a patch before any of the other anti-virus firms do so. Just Another Day At The Office is a story of hacking for organized crime against a firm developing a new type of land mine, and involves both network and physical building intrusion. While it might be easy to dismiss these as the result of a vivid imagination, the reality is that all of these attacks are done on a daily basis. They may even have happened to you at your company, and you just don't know it yet.

The final chapter, The Laws Of Security, is a discussion of computer security and how you need to be thinking in order to secure your network. So it's not just a series of stories with no opportunities to learn what needs to be done. Also, each story is detailed with specific software and techniques used to accomplish the hack or the trackdown of the intruder. So as you're reading the story, you're actually picking up the necessary information you need in order to understand the network weakness and how to defend against it.

In my opinion, it's this blending of fictional reality that makes this book so valuable. I'd definitely recommend this to any security professional who is looking to understand the person behind the attacks.

Conclusion
An excellent read... Takes the subject of network security out of the academic and theoretical and places a face and attitude behind it all, while also teaching you the nuts and bolts of how attacks occur.

In some ways I though this would be a recipe book of hacks like most in this category. This book has great stories about hacks from the hackers point of view. It is a lot of fun following the thought process as the hack's progress. There is a technical side to the book, but its buried within the stories. I will go back through the book again and make notes of the different techniques used.

So if you're tired of seeing screen shots of a debugger doing hex dump for some nerd stealing or saving the world and want some realistic stories, this is the book to get.

Overall I enjoyed this book. I felt it was a good read and although some of the "hacks" were hard to beleive on a technical level. It did get me thinking. I was entertained throughout and I would recommend this book to other IT or security professionals.

Well, this book *sounded* great. In fact, after taking a look at it I wondered if I'd received the correct item. For this price I'd expect more content. Instead, it's a bunch of stories. That's fine, and for maybe 15 bucks I'd buy it for airplane reading.

To be fair, it's advertised as supposedly fictional accounts. I guess I was just hoping that there was something meaty here. (Get it? Where's the beef? Hee hee.)

Spend your money on some of the classics instead, unless you're one of the few with disposable income.

While this is not the best book for an introduction into the technical issues surrounding hacking, it is an entertaining approach to some of the issues. The book is not meant to be an instruction course for hacking but rather just some fun stories about hacking. No, the stories didn't actually happen, but most of them could, possibly with a little stretching. I like the book and I think it's a lot of fun to read.

I was not very impressed with the publishing of this book. There were many typos and issues involving supposed screen prints that could not be adequately viewed.

The book was actually written as a novel and not actual incidents. With the number of true incidents occurring or that have occurred, using such incidents would have been much more useful.

I saw this book on the shelves and started flipping through it. Next thing I know it was a half hour later and I was still sitting on the floor with the same book in my lap.

In particular I wanted to read the chapter about H3x's adventure in networkland, since it seemed the most intriguing. She's a sexy female hacker that hits nightclubs and has a neon social life - so already we know the story is fiction, right?

I noticed that the author of one of the chapters posted a review. I didn't pay attention to which chapter and don't have the book in front of me, but he states that all the methods used are possible. Well, you can't have a technical book without subjecting it to technical scrutiny. Here's where the meat of my review weighs in: H3x's adventures sometimes make no sense, and other times are technically wrong. Let me explain.

First she realizes the changes she made on the routers at a university were logged to a syslog server, so she hacks that to cover her tracks by taking out the network address she used. Nevermind that she configured the routers to point a GRE tunnel to her home network, and then set "0wn3d" (or something similar) as the interface desription. Isn't that like sneaking tiptoe through a house late at night with a blaring stereo on your shoulders? And what kind of pipe would be going into her home to be able to keep up with an ethernet connection on a campus network? At this point everything is still technically possible, although somewhat unbelievable. Still - this is fiction after all.

The administrators catch wind of this and do all the obligatory password and community string changes, tightening of security with access lists and pant-wetting. Discovering H3x can no longer get in through the front door, she whips up some java which acts as a UDP proxy and tosses it on a network printer. Using this she is able to bypass some access lists and TFTP the configurations off the Cisco routers - and here's the kicker - without needing community strings. Unfortunately, this just is not technically possible.

I'd be curious to see what other technical reviewers have to say about the books merits. Again, it's a fascinating read but you may want to take some of the stories with a grain of salt. The landmine heist is another vastly entertaining story that bleeds into the absurd at times.

Read the book and let others know what you think of it!

This book reminds me of Neuromancer and Burning Chrome by William Gibson. Same atmosphere, same short story format. I loved this book. I was a big fan of the Cyberpunk genre and although this stops short of being a Cyberpunk book, you could consider it a prequel of sorts.

There are many books out there on security this one manages to be unique. I love the way they take real accurate information about various ways to get around security and break into networks and apply them to fictional situations.

The pace goes quickly because you get drawn into the story. You can always go back and re-read to pick up the details of how the character in the stories did their attacks. What keeps you going forward is the story.

Some of the chapters are not as good as others but because they stand alone it is easy to jump around from chapter to chapter sticking to the ones that draw your interest.

Anyone involved in securing a computer or network could benefit from reading this. The only problem is it could make you a little paranoid.

Not much scares me. I've seen a lot in my life. As a security engineer, this book scares. It makes me want to quit my day job and just go sell suntan lotion on the beach.

All of the things the reader is shown in the book can be defended. The problem lies in the resources available to the reader in trying to defend their crown jewels. Sure, there are plenty of free tools available to do nearly every job; but how much time do you have to set them all up, tune them, reconfigure and update as needed and review the output? I know we would need to up our IT security labor budget 1000% to cover all of this.

Chances are, this book is going to open your eyes to the way you think an intrusion may work. You may think that one vulnerability will be your downfall. With this book, the people who know will show you how a malicious hacker will slip through the cracks between you systems.

As an owner of dozens of IT security books, this is one that gets a space where I can easily access it and read it again and again.

Forget the Freddy vs. Jason battle; these people are showing you how the fight is being brought to your cube. Oh yeah, it's on!