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In defending your systems against intruders and other meddlers, a little knowledge can be used to make the bad guys--particularly the more casual among them--seek out softer targets.
Counter Hack aims to provide its readers with enough knowledge to toughen their Unix and Microsoft Windows systems against attacks in general, and with specific knowledge of the more common sorts of attacks that can be carried out by relatively unskilled "script kiddies." The approach author Ed Skoudis has chosen is effective, in that his readers accumulate the knowledge they need and generally enjoy the process.
The best part of this book may be two chapters, one each for Windows and Unix, that explain the essential security terms, conventions, procedures, and behaviors of each operating system. This is the sort of information that readers need--a Unix person getting into Windows administration for the first time needs an introduction to the Microsoft security scheme, and vice versa. A third chapter explains TCP/IP with focus on security. With that groundwork in place, Skoudis explains how (with emphasis on tools) attackers look for vulnerabilities in systems, gain access, and maintain their access for periods of time without being discovered. You'll probably want to search online resources for more specific information--Skoudis refers to several--but this book by itself will provide you with the vocabulary and foundation knowledge you need to get the details you want. --David Wall
Topics covered: How black-hat hackers work, what tools and techniques they use, and how to assess and improve your systems' defenses. The author explains how Windows, Unix, and TCP/IP can be exploited for nefarious purposes, and details a modus operandi that's typical of the bad guys.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
“I finally get it! I used to hear words like rootkit, buffer overflow, and idle scanning, and they just didn’t make any sense. I asked other people and they didn’t seem to know how these things work, or at least they couldn’t explain them in a way that I could understand. Counter Hack Reloaded is the clearest explanation of these tools I have ever seen. Thank you!”
—Stephen Northcutt, CEO, SANS Institute
“Ed Skoudis does it again! With this new edition, Ed takes a phenomenal work to the next level! This book is a ‘must-have’ and a ‘must-read’ for anyone remotely associated with computers and computer security.”
—Harlan Carvey, CISSP, author of Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery
“Ed Skoudis is a rare individual. He knows the innards of all the various systems, knows all the latest exploits and defenses, and yet is able to explain everything at just the right level. The first edition of Counter Hack was a fascinating read. It’s technically intriguing and very clear. . . . A book on vulnerabilities, though, will get out of date, and so we definitely needed this updated and significantly rewritten second edition. This book is a wonderful overview of the field.”
—From the Foreword by Radia Perlman, series editor, The Radia Perlman Series in Computer Networking and Security; author of Interconnections; and coauthor of Network Security: Private Communications in a Public World