Is it possible to write a handbook about an activity requiring creativity, endurance, patience, and intuition? This book shows that, to some extent, a practical and recipe-like approach to hacking (where the meaning of “hackers” is understood in the noble sense, associated with motivated and knowledge-thirsty computer users) can be written. The book starts with a hypothetical security incident, in which a fictional company is hacked, and proprietary source code tampered with. The remainder of the book lays the necessary building blocks for understanding how such attacks are performed. I liked the authors’ approach, where each chapter gives a comprehensive presentation of the technology/conceptual background, continues with the common hacking attacks against it, and finally provides a set of recipes for securing it.

The book will not turn a reader into a hacker. It doesn’t explain how exploit code is written, or how vulnerabilities are detected, but instead offers a comprehensive overview of the overall security landscape. In more than 800 pages, the author addresses all major security issues encountered on an enterprise network: network-level attacks, including network reconnaissance with domain name system (DNS) and network/port scanning, and transmission control protocol (TCP) stack fingerprinting; eavesdropping, address resolution protocol (ARP)/DNS poisoning, and Internet control message protocol redirects; identity hijacking, including password cracking and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) brute force session attacks; attacks against network directories, including lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP)/active directory; and specific network device-level attacks, including those on routers, wireless access points, and network management protocol vulnerabilities.

I cannot give a chapter-by-chapter detailed description, because it would not accurately reflect the book’s immense content. Instead, I will try to highlight some of the features that I liked most. First, the book is rather self-contained, and can also be used as an alternative reference to networking and transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP). Thus, it can serve as a guide to learn more about general networking, as well as about the underlying necessary security. Second, the book is well balanced between the described theory and the illustrated tools. Such a balance is rather rare nowadays, when most books tend either to be dry and neglect the practical aspect, or to restrict themselves to exhaustive tool descriptions and code samples, which do not make for very exciting reading. A third strong point of the book is its inclusion of many synthetic tables in each chapter. These tables are excellent references for locating a service-specific vulnerability, and then securing it efficiently.

There is one drawback: the book targets both Unix and Windows host systems without addressing the latest versions (Windows XP/Server 2003) of the Windows operating system family. This is only a minor criticism, since the overwhelming quantity of information in the book completely outweighs it. For the price of one book, you get, in reality, three different books: one about network technology, a second addressing network security, and a third handy reference for grasping/reviewing the essentials for a busy system or network manager.

This long and exciting description of applied hacking techniques ends with a chapter unveiling the scenario described at the beginning of the book. At the end, learn on how that fictional company was hacked. Obviously, the curious and impatient reader can skip ahead to this final chapter, but the solution to the puzzle is based on many concepts described in the previous intermediary chapters.

I liked this book very much, and recommend it warmly to anyone interested in network security. For an experienced reader, it can serve as a practical reference book, while a novice reader will appreciate reading it from cover to cover.