Hacking a Terror Network

Rating:
Summary: tedious and boring
Review: A tedious and boring book. Avowedly pedagogic in intent. Rogers writes a novel describing Muslim terrorists in the US, who communicate with each other via covert channels in the Internet. Specifically using steganography to concoct diabolical plots.

The pretentiousness appears immediately in the Foreword, where it is claimed that with the 2004 "Madrid attacks, we saw how terrorist organisations can be self-organising based on principles that look a lot like the scientific theories of emergence". Talk about over-reaching. Those terrorists appear to have used old fashioned cell techniques, which have been around for decades. No need to invoke any recent, trendy "emergence".

Then the Prologue has a real howler. It sets the scene in Iraq of early 1991. Where a person goes to an Internet cafe?! Say what? Pull the other leg, mate. It's got bells. There is a small issue of causality here. The first browser to be publicly released was Mosaic, in 1992-3. The Web took off after this, with the general public in developed countries directly aware of and using the Internet for the first time. The first Internet cafe in the world was in London in 1994, after this mass audience emerged for the first time. And the first Iragi Internet cafe was in 2000, by the way. Granted, the book is fiction. But here it veers into fantasy.

Going further into the plot is an unrewarding venture. Much of the narrative plods and plods over simple actions like this - "He pushed the found button... and moved the mouse on the mouse pad, waiting for the screen to show him the login prompt to the operating system". Leaden prose, lacking any spark of originality. On page after page. Why do we need to see this level of detail? Perhaps if you had never seen a computer before, it would be informative. But many of us now have enough passing acquaintance with computers to render that unnecessary. The author should have used more skill in deciding what level of detaiil to omit and what to focus on.

The book reads like a computer manual pretending to be a novel.

Rating:
Summary: Accomplishes its objective
Review: By way of full disclosure, I was the techincal editor on this book. I think Russ and I would be the first to admit it is far from perfect, but it does achieve its desired objective which is to educate readers on how terrorists might communicate using covert channels in a way that is generally accessible via a fictional narative.

I would take issue with W Boudville's claim of pretentiousness. He is missing the point on the emergence reference, as it is not intended to describe the cell's tactics (which were traditional), but rather the way they came together and engaged in action in support of a movement with no solid formal ties to the movement itself (in this instance, al Qaeda). No attempt at trendiness is intended, but I'll solidly stand by the reference.

If you are looking for a perfectly rounded novel with sophisticated character development and irrefutable plot components, you're likely to be unsatisfied with this book. If you want to learn about the technical topic at hand and be entertained at the same time, this book serves as an interesting and viable tool to do so.

Rating:
Summary: Good topic, bad presentation
Review: Hacking a Terror Network is a good book about an interesting topic.

but it does not work so well as a novel, and is very wordy.

Rating:
Summary: A good practical look at stenography...
Review: Syngress has created what I would call a new technical niche for publishing. For lack of a better term, I'll call it the "instructional cyber-novel". Their latest volume is Hacking A Terror Network - The Silent Threat Of Covert Channels by Russ Rogers. And like the other books of this type, I really liked it...

The core storyline revolves around an Arab student whose brother was killed many years ago when a misplaced mortar round (by western forces) blew up the cafe he was in. The father vows revenge, and raises the student with one overriding mission... strike back at the US. Using hidden internet communication vehicles such as stenography, the network is formed and a terror plot is launched. But before the first phase can be carried out, the student finally comes to grips with the fact that this hatred isn't what their religion is all about, and attempts to help the government figure out what's going to happen before disaster strikes. I've made the plot line pretty vague, as I don't want to give away any twists or endings...

In this instructional book, the plot line supports the technology behind covert communications. A great deal of time is spent on the subject of stenography, which is hiding messages within pictures and . But beyond that, they also cover how to send the data across communication protocols and use headers to hide the data. What it comes down to is that there are nearly endless places to communicate covertly over the 'net, and trying to uncover them is nearly impossible. The author shows plenty of software packages that facilitate this type of communication, as well as packages that help discover files that have stenography characteristics.

They story line isn't Tom Clancy blockbuster material, but it's not meant to be. This type of novel serves to both entertain and show how technology could be used to attack a country. I personally really like the genre and look forward to each new book that Syngress puts out in this area. If you're at all interested in this area of computing, you'll probably like this book.