Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent

Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: Not just another hacking book, Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent really shows you how to hack.

Highly recomended!

Rating:
Summary: Go for a hacker ride along
Review: This is a fascinating book. You not only get in-depth material on the technical aspects of hacking, you also get an interesting ride along with the hackers themselves. Going deep into the hacker community. The book is well written and gripping for anyone who liked a book like The Cuckoo's Egg, but yearned for a little more depth to the technology aspect.

If hacking is your thing then you will really enjoy this book. If you are a security person and you are interested in learning more about how hackers operate, then you should give this book a good look.

Rating:
Summary: A book about REAL hacking
Review: This is an amazing book about hacking. This will open your eyes to the world of hacking in the same way 'Hacking Exposed' did when it first came out. But different than HE, this doesn't jut tell you the how it tells you the why, and accomplishes this through an interesting fictional story. Anyone in the infosec world will recognize the tools and techniques used throughout the book as completely real and accurate. In many cases the authors of the book are the creators of the tools themselves--like the chapter Fyodor wrote which uses Nmap. I enjoy reading security books, but it's become incresingly difficult to find truly unique, original material. This book certainly fits the bill.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating educational fiction
Review: Through a series of fictional system attacks and exploits Stealing the Network: How To Own a Continent provides a basic education in network security. More than just what can happen, it details each attack so you learn the purpose of the attack as well as how it is carried out. Each of the chapters provides the fictional account of an individual who takes on a single network attack. What the reader soon discovers is that it is actually a carefully orchestrated chain of attacks with a larger purpose in mind.

One of the things I really liked about the book is that it is not just a dry security book turned into a more interesting novel but it gives the reader a look at the personalities of those who get involved in these things. Each of the attacks involves real tools that can be downloaded or purchased off the Internet as well as real techniques. If you want to know how an attacker thinks and how far they will go to achieve their goals as well as some of the common techniques you can't go wrong with Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent.