Denial of Service Books

No Place Left to Bury the Dead is one of the best books that I have ever read. The author, Nicole Itano, beautifully tells the story how HIV/AIDS affects the lives of three families in three different African counties. The author also brilliantly weaves in the history of the pandemic and its spread not only in Africa but throughout the world. The book explores several cultural,social and public health aspects of AIDS in Africa that I feel are often overlook in our Western view of the world. This book made me smile, it made me angry and it made me cry. It refined my view of the AIDS pandemic and opened my heart with a new found compassion. I could not put the book down. I true MUST read.No Place Left to Bury the Dead: Denial, Despair and Hope in the African AIDS Pandemic

Ms. Itano's work makes the complex challenge that HIV/AIDS poses to southern Africa and the world at large understandable to the lay reader. She blends personal stories with lessons on history, culture, and medicine, making AIDS personal for her readers. Her characters are compelling, and her personal relationship to and concern for them is evident. I'm looking forward to her next book.

I visited South Africa in 2006 so I feel this book is very relevant to my experiences there. If you want to learn about truth and suffering, and step back into reality, this is the book that will help you do that. There is truly no place left to bury the dead in South Africa.

Itano's extraordinarily personal reporting and the powerful narrative it produced makes this book seem like a movie on paper. You have the sense that one day you'll see characters like Rich Uncle Isaacs, Adeline, and Bongy come to life on the silver screen. It packs a powerful emotional wallop and brings Africa to life in all its amazing colors. Could easily be the next Constant Gardener.

I am amazed I haven't heard more buzz about this book ... it's a great book and I'm so happy I read it. But it's not the happiest of subject matters obviously.

Despite the No Place Left to Bury the Dead title, this book details the struggles people, particularly women, LIVING with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa experience.

HIV/AIDS in Africa is no longer an automatic death sentence but there are too few people getting HIV/AIDS tests, too much stigma and far too many people are not getting the treatment they need due to a number of issues including money, lack of knowledge, stigma and most importantly lack of a proper health care infrastructure.

It may frustrate the reader that the book doesn't have an official ending or happy notes on the book's main characters ... but I guess that's reality unfortunately.

Buy this book!

Pamela Appea

In this book David Endler and Mark Collier have pulled together a vast wealth of material about hacking VoIP networks at every possible level. More than this, they have also created new value in the form of software test tools, which they have published on an accompanying website. It really is a must-have reference book for anyone working in VoIP.

Chapter 1 talks about Google hacking, or in other words, using the Internet to find out things about a target network. They show that Google can be a crucial tool in finding out what type of hardware and software you use in your VoIP networks, and in some cases will give vital clues even about how to login to the management systems of your network from the Internet. If this doesn't scare the bejesus out of you, then proceed on to further chapters about more VoIP-specific issues.

Chapters 2 and 3 detail the kind of tools a hacker might use to scan your network and enumerate all the devices, i.e. build their own map of how your network is laid out, right down to the telephone numbers and MAC addresses of desktop phones. Chapter 4 talks about Denial-of-Service, and the kind of attack resources that hackers might use to cripple a telephony network.

Chapter 5 is on VoIP eavesdropping, talking about some existing tools that can be used for this (Oreka, Wireshark and the unpleasantly named vomit), and as in the earlier chapters, some suggestions on how to defend against such a type of threat. Chapter 6 goes further to explain how a VoIP man-in-the-middle attack might be mounted, giving the possibility not just to listen, but to modify, replace or remix the audio stream.

Chapters 7, 8, 9 talk about specific platform threats, namely to Cisco Unified CallManager, Avaya Communication Manager and the Asterisk PBX. The vendors have added their own comment to these chapters, at the request of the authors. Chapter 10 takes in Softphones, including Google Talk, Gizmo, Yahoo and of course the ever popular Skype.

Chapter 11 describes VoIP fuzzing, or in other words, testing protocol stacks for flaws, so this is useful for those developing VoIP systems and applications. Chapter 12 talks about disruption of networks using flooding techniques and chapter 13 talks about Signaling and Media Manipulation.

The final section of the book is entitled Social Threats, and talks about SPAM over Internet Telephony (SPIT) in Chapter 14, followed by Voice Phishing in Chapter 15. Neither of these threats are in frequent use yet, but their use is certain to increase in the future, so this is a good moment to get to grips with what this means.

This is a highly technical book, but for managers responsible for IT security but not immersed in the details I would say this: buy the book, and read the case studies. There are five sections to the book, and each starts with a short case study. Invest 20 minutes in reading these, and you will start to get an appreciation for how important VoIP Security will be in the future. Then pass the book on to your hands-on security guy and tell him to read it from cover to cover.

Hacking Exposed: VoIP (HE:V) is the sort of HE book I like. It's fashionable to think HE books are only suitable for script kiddies who run tools they don't understand against vulnerable services they don't recognize. I like HE books because the good ones explain a technology from a security standpoint, how to exploit it, and how to defend it. I thought HE:V did well in all three areas, even featuring original research and experiments to document and validate the authors' claims.

HE:V is a real eye-opener for those of us who don't perform VoIP pen testing or assessments. It's important to remember that the original HE books were written by Foundstone consultants who put their work experience in book form. HE books that continue this tradition tend to be successful, and HE:V is no exception. Good HE books also introduce a wide variety of tools and techniques to exploit weaknesses in targets, and HE:V also delivers in this respect. HE:V also extends attacks beyond what most people recognize. For example, everyone probably knows about low-level exploitation of VoIP traffic for call interception and manipulation. However, chapter 6 discusses application-level interception.

HE:V goes the extra mile by introducing tools written by the authors specifically to implement attacks. In at least one case the authors also provide a packet capture (for the Skinny protocol) which I particularly appreciate. HE:V also looks ahead to attacks that are appearing but not yet prevalent, like telephony spam and voice phishing. Taken together, all of these features result in a great book. You should already be familiar with the common enumeration and exploitation methods found in HE 5th Ed, because the HE:V authors wisely avoid repeating material in other books (thank you).

If you want to understand VoIP, how to attack it, and how to defend it, I highly recommend reading HE:V. The book is clear, thorough, and written by experts.

Alcoholism is an insidious, life threatening disease and all who live on a merry-go-round with an alcoholic loose unless someone has the courage to stop it. This book really tells you how. ... and luckily you don't have to wait until the alcoholic
wants help.

This is one of my favorite security books from O'Reilly, primarily for the first four chapters which are dedicated to reverse engineering software. While there are a few texts out there that are dedicated to the subject and go into almost painful detail, this book is great for someone who is new to the skill. The other chapter that I was happy to see was chapter twenty-two which covers forensics and anti-forensics. While the coverage on anti-forensics was a bit light, it was great to actually see it included. I would be very interested to see (perhaps write?) a full book on this from O'Reilly sometime in the future, particularly given some of the attack methods on full disk encryption coming out of Princeton as of late.

Overall, a great tome on security with a good body of solid and applicable information. I'm hoping to see an updated edition.

This book is outstanding and an essential read for anyone doing web-based application development.

It is very eye-opening to the current state of web security.

Security Warrior has good overall coverage and plenty technical details for people like me who are interested in the technical details.

This book contains some okay level of steering, but that's about it. The technical accuracy I see exhibited here can only be rivaled by your grandma explaining Windows system internals. It doesn't end at just the author's confusion of C and C++ (classic "strcpy() and other C++ functions" babble); the very explanation of why a program crashes, or how an attack works, or how variables and buffers get created is flat wrong.

I had to stop reading this in the buffer overflow chapter. Highlights include the flawed interpretation of the error message from when bigmac() returned (it returned to non-mapped memory, the book says it read past the end of a string); the horrible explanation of how buffers work (buffers are not simple variables, and variables do not allocate multiple chunks of memory for themselves as explained); and the incorrect description of the return-to-text attack (returned to existing code, but the book says it's run code you injected onto the stack). After reading a stream of these such inaccuracies, I stopped looking for something that actually came out right.

The buffer overflow chapter can easily be replaced with Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. Read that instead. It's also got better networking and WEP attack explanations.

This book should be titled "General Security Buzzwords 101 For The High Level User." The information in it just misses the information that one would be looking for in a technical environment.

As a work of scholarship whose purpose is to provide an understanding of the the "...politics of industrial pollution", this book is nearly useless. The main problems are: 1) undocumented assertions are made in every chapter, 2) terms which are critical to the book, such as "toxic" and "high cancer death rate", are never defined, and 3) the treatment is anachronistic throughout. It is difficult to believe that authors who make the statement, "...new classes of disease and damage to the body that are too subtle to even measure" (p. 296) actually know anything about the subject.

I read this book about 2 years ago after my manager gave it to me. It is an excellent, non-sensationalized, review of historical actions of large corporations which compromised the public health of our citizens. It is well supported by cited references. A must read for occupational health professionals who are working to protect employees against little known hazards.

This is an extraordinary book. Unlike other books that address the corruption of industry, this book has the documents and information that you really need. Few stories of environmental duplicity ever provide this kind of detail and data.

But most importantly, it read like a detective story, which, in fact, it is! Bill Moyers is absolutely correct in his cover blurb! What a joy to read.

"Lawsuits... against some of the largest chemical and petrochemical companies in the world have led to the discovery of documents that show lying, manipulation of government officials, and secrecy as tools used by industry to protect its product. What emerges is a history of deceit that is strikingly similar to that of the asbestos and tobacco industries." [This and all quotes from my review are from Deceit and Denial]

Deceit and Denial is an exceptionally well researched book that lays bare the astounding extent of American corporate and political malfeasance with regard to industrial pollution in the 20th century, specifically focusing on the lead, chemical, and plastics industries. The authors' use of hitherto unseen primary source documents from corporate archives to make their case adds tremendous weight to the argument that industrial pollution damages not only people's physical health and the environment in which they live but also undermines our country's social and democratic institutions.

Deceit and Denial eloquently and thoroughly expounds on the proposition that corporate self-regulation is dangerous and that "when it comes to public health, the society has a right to insist that the community's interests come before the shareholders' profits." The reader is also reminded of a notion that has fallen by the wayside in post-9/11 America: it is "absolutely essential to have as much openness and free access to information as possible."

These ideas may not be new but you would be mistaken in thinking that this book is the product of a radical left-wing or environmentalist agenda. This is scholarly research of the first order. Deceit and Denial succeeds in being not only a damning indictment of past corporate machinations and political complicity but a lucid exposition of the critical issues that industry and our nation currently face in the 21st century.

This is an extraordinary book. Unlike other books that address the corruption of industry, this book has the documents and information that you really need. Few stories of environmental duplicity ever provide this kind of detail and data.

But most importantly, it reads like a detective story, which, in fact, it is! Bill Moyers is absolutely correct in his cover blurb! What a joy to read.

What a wonderful gift you have given to the world! Unlike so much of contemporary spiritual literature, Kenosis not only informed my mind but profoundly touched my heart. Most importantly it offered me something I have been personally searching for over the past years, a spiritual focus. I started reading and critically examining it as a book for the general public but ended up savoring it as a book that seemed to be speaking directly to me.

A prime measure of greatness in any work of the mind, heart, or hand is its exhibition of a single sovereign integrating principle that illumines and interprets a wide range of elements. Fr. Cronin's little masterpiece is such a work. Fr. Cronin's book is an achievement worthy of the great tradition of Francis of Assisi, with its magisterial simplicity, humble practicality, passionate concern for all God's creatures, and joyous embracing of the Cross of Christ. Its catholic and cosmic vision qualify it as a classic expression of and guide to Christian spirituality for our age.

Warm, personal, honest, and very Franciscan, Kenosis presents a model and mentor for Christian ministry today. The gospel becomes credible in writings like these. It makes me proud to be a Franciscan!

Kenosis is the two month odyssey in New York City of a twenty-five year old man who directs his talents and youthful strength at doing what God wants. Kenosis is a book written on the edge of a precipice. It reads like a Robinson Crusoe adventure of the spirit!

Kenosis comes from the heart! This book will allow you to view an individual who has chosen religious service as his life. It allows you to see this individual as a human with needs and concerns and conflicts that are not always in sync with the expected behavior of his traditions. The key element to this story is that this person is human and is often times called upon to be more than that just by the mere choosing of his vocation. We all look at people who have chosen religious life and expect that it is so easy for them to give of themselves whenever WE need it or think it should be given freely. Do we ever allow for this person to be mortal? Could you choose a life where every day you witness human pain, grief, dispair, poverty, loneliness, and sadness? The desire to want to make a difference in these things has to come from Kenosis. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone thinking of choosing religious life. This book will expel any fanasy that one might have of a religious life being an easy path. The dedication to ones God, ones self, and humankind is enormous. The reality is that it can be accomplished. The proof is Fr. Kevin Cronin!

This book is much more than the title implys. While it is a through analysis of why the war on drugs is failing it is also visionary in its view of the future. The implications of the next "post drug war era" are explored with a focus on what this means for treatment, prevention and enforcement. Quite simply this book is a must read!

"Drug War Politics" is an informative work and a must-have for the freedom fighter. Unfortunately,like all other published works except for one, it does not call for the repeal of prohibition. This is a dreadful oversight and it shows just how institutionalized tyranny has become in America.

Calling for reform, legalization, harm reduction etc., simply concedes the "right" of government to prohibit. No such right exists because prohibition laws are repugnant to the spirit of our fundamental legal source: The Declaration of Independence.

I've studied and written volumes on this subject only to discover that the Establishment Curtain makes the Cold War Iron Curtain look like the sheerest of negligees.

If you want the WHOLE truth you must always follow the money trail to its very end. In the case of prohibition you will discover an ever-growing JUDICIAL INDUSTRY that "legally" preys on harmless humans and the taxpayers for $billions annually. This is the best kept secret in America.

There are but two types of crime. Force and Fraud. Self-medication is neither. Either this is a secret kept from America's legislators and judges or they have taken criminal license with our Constitution's Comerce Clause.

Folks, it's time to unshackle our grand juries by making them fully aware of their right to function independently and issue presentments.

Tinsley Grey Sammons BASTIATLAW@aol.com

This five year old book is regrettably as relevant as if put together yesterday. The authors deplore the use of mind altering drugs. Eva Bertram and her cohorts, however, are "troubled by a common pattern in public policy: the persistence of unworkable (criminal justice) policies in the face of overwhelming evidence of their failure...It seemed to be conventional wisdom that the reason force had not worked was not that enough had been applied and that the logical response, therefore, was escalation--not reevaluation."

The vice of political correctness is not limited those of a more Liberal temperament. William F. Buckley is cited as one of the few high profile conservatives willing to publicly challenge the Republican status quo. Politically powerful conservatives relish in "viciously attacking and demeaning critics and sidelining pragmatic alternatives. Less zealous conservatives and liberals, many of whom are skeptics or closet critics, have been willing to go along or have chosen to remain silent," add the authors. Democrats such as President Jimmy Carter attempted to redirect our efforts to treating mind altering drugs as primarily a medical problem. The ensuing tidal wave of public outrage severely threatened his political power. George W. Bush won the 1994 Texas Governors race in part by successfully attacking Texas Democrat Governor Ann Richards for the latter's "actively pushed diversion-to-treatment and in-prison treatment programs in the early 1990s."

The authors point out that our country has reversed its original relative indifference to the mind altering drugs of choice. Logically it is difficult to distinguish between the harm caused by alcohol, tobacco, marihuana, or cocaine. Heroin, many studies indicate, is far less damaging than alcohol. Another fly in the ointment is the problem of police corruption. Edgar J. Hoover was hesitant to involve the FBI for this very reason. "The logic of the drug war creates enormous pressures," the writers also reveal "to circumvent or transgress...constitutional rights." The Catch 22 circumstances of the drug wars "guarantee that poor and minority residents will be netted by the drug-enforcement system in highly disproportionate numbers." Police agencies prefer going after easier convictions to augment their overall numbers---amd if nothing else, people mired in poverty are easier to send to jail because they rarely obtain first class legal assistance. Is the drug war unwittingly racist? Would we persist with today's drug war if more establishment white people filled our jails? American citizens no longer have the right to ignore these awkward questions.

Bertram and her group suggest that it's time we take a serious look at decriminalization. They realistically concede that a social price will have to be paid. Alcohol abuse decreased during our nation's prohibition era. The numbers went back up sharply after legalization. Some individuals will inevitably experiment with legally sanctioned drugs. Nonetheless, life is often about trade offs, balancing off the good against the bad. Taking a chance on decriminalization is not a perfect solution, but likely the lesser of evils. I strongly recommend --Drug War Politics.-- You owe it to yourself to read it thoroughly. The price of denial is indeed too high.

It is fair to say that most of the current strategies for network defense are passive, in that they involve setting up elaborate security shields to thwart or redirect intruders. The reason for this no doubt is that network administrators and IT departments do not want to face the legal consequences if they do as the authors of this book advocate, namely launching an attack on an intruder (human or otherwise) that will effectively disable it or at least frustrate it to a large degree. Interestingly though, the legal framework surrounding "aggressive" network self-defense is far from being clear. It would seem that existing laws on the books dealing with harassment and public nuisance would in fact support a large degree of "strike-back" network defense. The authors of this book seem to agree on this legal right, but the initial discussions in the book do illustrate the severe consequences that could arise if a security administrator were to take up the strike-back philosophy.

The weapons of aggressive self-defense include the PDA, which is discussed in the first chapter of the book, and which are described as being "easy to infect" by the author of the chapter. After bragging how he was able to compromise other people's PDA via the exchange of games, he discovered that his own PDA had been compromised by a key logger. He then describes how he found out exactly how he was infected, called naturally "computer forensics." To carry out the `reverse engineering' requires a debugger, a disassembler, and a hex editor. His discussion will be fascinating reading, especially those readers (such as this reviewer) who are not committed hackers or security specialists, but who need a good understanding of the issues in order to attempt to emulate them in more sophisticated, distributed computing environments. To get down to the assembly language after possibly many years of high-level programming is intoxicating to say the least. The author's analysis leads him to the conclusion that a backdoor FTP server running on port 69 (instead of the usual port 21). His plan was then to find out who installed the FTP server and then launch a reverse attack. The attack consisted of two phases, with the first one preventing the attacker from having access to his information and trick the attacker into downloading a file of his choice. The manner in which the author communicates convinces the reader that he knows what he is talking about. In order to know for sure one would have to go through the attack procedures as he organizes them. Unfortunately he author lost his job over his escapades, when instead he should have been rewarded for his ingenuity and skill. He was acting properly in taking action against an attack originally targeted to his machine.

The next chapter discusses an attack scenario in a common place these days: the cybercafe. The goal of the chapter is convince the reader to be wary of wireless hotspots that can easily be compromised. The author describes a scenario that actually began with criminal intent, and occurring in a WLAN environment, consisted of tricking users into logging into a person's own laptop. The author describes in detail what this person had to create and install on his laptop in order to pull off this deception, becoming the notorious "man-in-the-middle." He did this in order to obtain the credit card numbers of the customers who unwittingly logged into his machine instead of the correct access point. His scam was discovered and he was rightly arrested after he had run up over $10,000 in charges. But interestingly, his man-in-the-middle scam was detected by the WLAN administrator, and when this individual took it on himself to perform the investigation he attacked the scammer's machine and in the process broke some many laws that the evidence he collected was ruled inadmissible. The credit card companies sued the administrator since he nullified the federal case against the original scammer. Even though he won the case against him, his culpability is a grey area for sure, and this case reflects some of the ambiguities in digital law at the present time (both criminal and civil).

There are many more attack scenarios discussed in the book, all of which serve as tutorials in the many different tools that are have been exploited by both invaders and attackers. These include cache snooping, port knocking, TCPDump, Knoppix STD, Ethereal, Squid, honeypots, Sudo, cookie tracking, Trojan horses, keyloggers, Netcat, Nmap, PatriotBox, Traceroute, ping sweeping, IPSec rule injection, MD5 hashing, Stripwire, passive strike-back, and mass vulnerability scans. There is ample material here to educate oneself on how attacks can be accomplished and how therefore to defend systems against them. By far the most interesting part of the book though is the second one, since it goes into more of the conceptual background behind what the authors call `active defense.' They define this as an "action sequence performed between the time an attack is detected and the time it is known to be finished, in an automated or non-automated fashion, to mitigate a threat against a particular asset." This definition is one that is used in their model of network defense, which they call ADAM (Active Defense Algorithm and Model). The different steps to be taken, and the legal and ethical ramifications of ADAM are discussed in great detail. An interesting part of this discussion concerns the `scoring chart' that is used to compare the risk of a materializing threat with the risk of an active defense action. In addition, the calculation of risk is interesting in that it is similar to what is done in some areas of financial engineering.

The title of this book says "Agressive." A better word might be "Vigilante."

I live in the west. Vigilante's came about because the law enforcement of the time was to weak to handle the problems. I don't know but that this is the situation out on the internet. I understand that CoolWebSearch is written/distributed from Russia. Who is going to go tell them that I don't want their stuff on my machine?

This book presents a series of "fictional" incidents where people being attacked strike back using technological means. Most of the time the police get involved at the end, usually finding the wrong man. None the less, the stories do an excellent job of describing how "aggressive" network defenders might attempt to strike back at attackers. These stories are certainly a more interesting approach than the typical computer manual.

The second part of the manual gets more technical and describes in greater depth the tools and techniques that the defenders in the fictional stories use.

The whole book brings up a series of moral questions. Where do you just build walls and defenses vs. where do you go out and counter-attack the attackers? Where are you counter-attacking illegally, with the potential to get caught yourself? It's quite a book and perhaps a sign of the coming times.

Most computer security books focus on how to defend a computer system or network from outside attack: that's the basic difference between them and Neil R. Wylder's Aggressive Network Self-Defense: I'm Mad As Hell, And I'm Not Gonna Take It Anymore! The focus here is on the technical, legal and financial ramifications of a 'strike-back' and 'active defense' program which promotes doing more than just defense. Chapters cover 'cyber dogfights' between hackers and defender/attackers, offers up tales of revenge and following the trail of an attacker, accounts of fights at different network levels, and stories of problem-solving in network attacks. Both fictional and many real-life scenarios are covered, with plenty of technical computer detail. A lively, satisfying book for all levels of computer user, but particularly administrators who want to do more than just defend.

The book is riddled with sloppy prose that has not seen the attention of a careful editor. Throughout the book, most figures are annoying. They are screen or window captures. The authors chose the quick and dirty way of doing this and then pasting them into the text. But the resolution of the resultant printed images makes the contents out of focus. Yes, perhaps if you squint hard enought and interpolate, you can deduce the text. But this is what I mean. Annoying.

The chapters do offer amusing fictional plots that give tactics on both intruder and defender. Part of the appeal of the book is that these roles can switch. There are enough technical details supplied in the text to make the tactics credible to a computer person.

The discussion on the limitations of MD5 to a crafted collisions attack is well done. Very sneaky. Though still quite speculative, as the text rightfully points out.

The Strike Back chapter describes Armpit - a tool written as a "human detector". It is run as a daemon on a server. It permits access to resources only if the client browser can interpret Flash. This is seen as tantamount to implying that there is a human at the client, and not an automated attack tool, since most instances of the latter cannot do Flash. But this just begs the question. Surely if Armpit becomes common, it gives incentive for future attack tools to be able to run Flash? The narrative gives no technical reason why a cracker cannot take this logical countermeasure.

More importantly, the book fails to recognise that Armpit is a challenge response method. Those of you familiar with antispam ideas should realise this immediately. Plus, Mailblocks has a patent on challenge response. It would have been useful for the book to discuss whether this patent (or any others) could make any infringement claims against the company that wrote Armpit.

Continuing in the new theme of fiction and technical how-to, Aggressive Network Self-Defense brings together several authors to provide a wide range of material. Syngress' niche in this space seems to be breaking new ground -- and for the most part, it works. While you don't get as in-depth a treatment as a typical technical book gives you, there is an added dimension: namely, a more realistic scenario of how these tools fit together in a real, live series of actions.

Not being a big fan of most fiction (I tend to prefer history), it's hard to say definitively good or bad things about the quality of the writing. What I can say is that it's infinitely less irritating, and far more realistic, than Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or Gibson's Neuromancer. No over-the-top smearing of adjectives to describe the mundane, and no unrealistic sequences of events. Then again, there's no character development and no real story progression, so it's not great fiction.

As a series of hacker vignettes, the book works just fine, and very well for the purposes at hand. Basically, what the authors want you to get from the book is two-fold: First, they want you to debate the issues around "strike back" attack methodologies. Several of the authors are open advocates of what are legal grey areas and open moral questions in the field of network security. Secondly, they want you to see how it's done, what you do when you actually use a tool to achieve a goal. Most books that do this, like Hacking Exposed, cover far more tools, but they usually do so without showing you each tool's use in a real-world scenario.

I won't bore you with a lengthy, detailed overview of the first part of the book. Like I said, it's a series of part fiction, part tutorial series of short stories. In them, you'll see tools like Metasploit, virus creation, some nmap, sniffers, and keystroke loggers, all in action, being used as an operator would use them, and achieving real goals. This is more valuable than a basic manual, and the stories themselves act as a nice setting. While not great fiction writers, the authors are decent enough at the job, and they write the technical material clearly.

The second part of the book is interesting. It makes up about a fifth of the book in volume, but a lot more in technical weight. The book bills this section as "The technologies and concepts behind network strike-back," and that's an accurate summary. It's a series of four unique perspectives and technical chapters that complement the rest of the book quite well.

The first introduces ADAM, the "Active Defense Algorithm and Model," which develops a methodology for network administrators to actively defend their networks against attacks. It's quite interesting, and brings together a number of risk models in an uncommon take. The authors are academic researchers from the University of Idaho, so it's a lot more academic than the previous material in Aggressive Network Self-Defense, but it formalizes a lot of the thinking that was present in the writing of the stories and techniques.

The second is Tim Mullen's classic "Defending your right to defend." This is the original position paper shared by Mullen with the information security community in 2002 or so. Here, Mullen makes a compelling case for actually striking back at worm infected hosts. After all, the position holds, someone should do something about them to help clean up the Internet. While it's a position I disagreed with at the time and still do, Mullen's writing is articulate and an important read. It really helps you understand a lot of the thinking that went into the book itself.

Dan Kaminsky wrote the next chapter, "MD5 to be considered harmful someday." Largely considered to be a follow-on to Joux and Wang's one-way hash function research, what it shows is how practical such an attack can be. Kaminsky never fails to come up with interesting ideas he puts into practice, and he adds another level of depth to this book.

Finally, Aggressive Network Self-Defense ends with an interesting paper, "When the tables turn: Passive strike-back." Like any good paper, it has a clear and thoughtful motivation, and really demonstrates the principles at play, namely building network resources that don't simply lure the attacker in, they trip her up. There are so many ways to do this, the authors show us, and ultimately it's almost fun. A good way to end the book.

An over-arching concern with the book that I have is the question of ethics. Mullen, in the foreword, states that he hopes the book stirs a debate about the ethics of the actions in the book. However, the book itself falls short in this area. Instead, sometimes the characters get busted, and sometimes they don't, but just because they didn't get caught doesn't mean some ethical lines weren't crossed. All too often the authors leave the ethical debate up in the air. While I prefer this to overt preaching or questions, the style leaves me wondering if this goal was achieved.

So, where do I stand on Aggressive Network Self-Defense? In the end, I like it, more so than a book like Hacking Exposed or other "hacking how-to" types. The style of presentation doesn't lend itself all that well to exploring a very wide number of tools, but it does give you a deeper context to see how they assemble into something larger. For many people I expect it will be a page turner, and I think the format has some utility, as shown here.

Nutshell review - If you want to know all about denial of service attacks then this is an excellent book to start with. Well written, easy to understand and excellent coverage of the topic.

There are obviously a multitude of ways an attacker can take your site down. One way is via a denial of service attack. There's a new book out that covers just that attack in great detail: Internet Denial Of Service - Attack and Defense Mechanisms by Jelena Mirkovic, Sven Dietrich, David Dittrich, and Peter Reiher (Prentice Hall).

Chapter list: Introduction; Understanding Denial of Service; History of DoS and DDos; How Attacks Are Waged; An Overview of DDoS Defenses; Detailed Defense Approaches; Survey of Research Defense Approaches; Legal Issues; Conclusions; Glossary; Survey of Commercial Defense Approaches; DDoS data; References; Index

Going into this book, I can say I knew about the basics of a Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. What I didn't understand is how sophisticated they've become. The book covers (in deep detail) how bot or zombie networks are developed and utilized to launch these types of attacks. I didn't realize that it's relatively easy to acquire a bot network of over 100000 clients who can flood a site with packets. And it's not even necessary to use them all at once. Attacks can start with a fraction of the clients, and then escalate as the victim attempts to filter packets or add bandwidth. It's a scary thing. The authors also cover the various issues involved in the defense of these types of attacks. Filtering might work, but it can be difficult to find the correct filtering parameters that don't also drop legitimate traffic. And due to the distributed nature of the attack, it can be nearly impossible to find the culprit, and worse, to prevent it from happening again.

Walking away from this book, you don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling about the current situation. Regardless of what steps you take, there is no current sure-fire method for defending these attacks. But by reading Internet Denial of Service, you'll be far more prepared to understand what's going on and what realistic options do exist. Better yet, it also gives you the steps you need to take to prepare your site for this type of incursion beforehand. If you've mapped out your plan ahead of time, you can definitely minimize (to some extent) the damage that can occur.

This is a good read for any security professional tasked with security and availability of an organizational website. Reading this now could save your job later...

'Internet Denial of Service' (IDOS) is an excellent book by expert authors. IDOS combines sound advice with a fairly complete examination of the denial of service (DoS) problem set. Although the authors write from the DoS point of view, as a network security monitoring advocate I found myself agreeing with many of their insights. Since there are no other books dedicated to DoS, I was very pleased to find this one is a powerful resource for managers and technicians alike.

IDOS features some of the best minds on DoS research available. Everyone has heard of Dave Dittrich, but I found the work of lead author Jelena Mirkovic to be particularly valuable. Peter Reiher and long-time DoS researcher Sven Dietrich also give the project considerable weight. All four authors work for or with universities, and IDOS reflects this academic connection by frequently citing papers and DoS research. For example, chapter 7 describe DoS mitigation approaches and Appendix C examines the best available data on DoS techniques. I would encourage other authors to make similar references to the academic community and not write in a literary vacuum.

By making references to outside works, IDOS successfully avoids repeating material published elsewhere. Chapter 6 was probably my favorite section, including much distilled wisdom and advice on responding to DoS attacks. I welcomed the authors' frequent recommendations to collect session and full content data. It is often impossible to detect and respond to attacks without this sort of network-based evidence. This point is often lost on vendors or consultants who lack experience performing incident response.

I had minor problems with the book. First, I would have liked more technical detail in chapter 6. For example, it would have been nice to see examples of system metrics from nodes or routers under DoS attack. Specific advice on host tuning techniques would also have been useful, e.g., make changes X, Y, or Z on FreeBSD or Cisco IOS to better resist DoS conditions. I was also slightly disappointed the authors did not base their discussions of commercial products in Appendix B on hands-on evaluations. I understand the problem with meeting this objective, however.

I did not have any problems with the legal or concluding chapters (8 & 9). I think the earlier three-star reviewer found himself on the wrong side of the 1999 "RST scan" controversy discussed on p. 52 and may not have been happy by the (correct) stance taken by IDOS.

I highly recommend every security professional read IDOS. It's a convenient and illuminating discussion of a problem that will never disappear. This book will prepare you to do battle with DoS attacks, and for that I am thankful.

Internet Denial of Service

I certainly enjoyed reading this book, in fact I started looking at it during the work day and couldn't wait for everyone to leave at quitting time so I could finish it. It seems to have a bit of trouble finding its niche, most of the time it has the feel of a research paper, but from time to time there are amazingly practical tidbits. If you are looking for a how to stop denial of service, step by step, buy the cup of coffee from Borders and leaf through the book and make your decision carefully. If you are a researcher in the USA interested in Internet protocols and US law and response, this is a must read, must have. If you are truly seeking to understand what zombie style distributed denial of service is and is capable of, buy the book and read it three times. My response team worked closely with one of the authors, David Dittrich from 1999 - 2001 and if there is a "been there, done that" individual when it comes to malicious code, he would be that person.

This is not a book for a novice, but if you know your way around a network and know a bit about routing, there are a number of helpful illustrations and code segments that drive the points home.

I realize I gave the book three stars even though I liked it a lot and that is primarily because the book is much weaker in the two final chapters, 8 and 9. You just can't throw issues like law, ethics, jurisdiction, evidence collection, and estimation of damages on the table, write a couple paragraphs and zoom on, someone could get hurt. For the right reader, this can be a wonderful resource.

Your take on this book really depends on where you are sitting. The authors lucidly describe what a Denial of Service attack is. More to the point, the book then goes into an explanation of its more dangerous variant - the Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] attack. The book is really about the latter; not the simple DoS. We see how DDoS evolved rapidly from 1999 to 2005, with the number of computers hijacked to become agents for an attack expanding from hundreds to over a hundred thousand. And how it no longer seems to be done by joyriding hackers just seeking a thrill. Now, it may actually be a business; a major branch of malware.

You should have a reasonable background in understanding TCP/IP, to appreciate the book's technical discussions. For example, if you see mention of the TTL field in a header, you should already know what it means.

The book explains several postulated countermeasures to DDoS. Nifty ideas like traceback and pushback. Or perhaps doing an entropy count of good and bad packets, to help distinguish between them. The problem is that none of these are truly effective. DDoS is an unsolved problem. So if you are a cracker, this is good news. Not so for sysadmins.

But there is something else. Perhaps DDoS is fundamentally insolvable, under the current IPv4 and current router capabilities. But maybe this field is still young. What is a problem for many could be a chance for you, as a researcher or inventor.

This book has a lot to offer for people who are interested in child sexual abuse. It was well written and reflected a significant amount of research.