CyberWar

Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

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Know Your Enemy: Learning about Security Threats (2nd Edition)

Know Your Enemy: Learning about Security Threats (2nd Edition) @ CyberWar: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum“The Honeynet guys have always been fighting the good fight: messing with the hackers’ heads, learning what they’re doing, collecting their tools and tricks, and sharing the knowledge with the rest of the good guys. It’s one thing to sit around and try to guess what the hackers are up to, but the Honeynet Project just rolled up their sleeves and went on the offensive in their own unique way. Never before has being a victim been so cool! This book is a great resource for the serious information security professional and the beginning practitioner alike.”
Marcus J. Ranum, Senior Scientist, TrueSecure Corp.

“The Honeynet Project is one of the best sources, if not the best source, for information about current techniques and trends in the blackhat community. They are also how-to experts in setting up and gathering information–safely–about these attackers. The Honeynet Project’s ability and willingness to share cutting-edge information is an immeasurable benefit to the security community.”
–Jennifer Kolde, security consultant, author, and instructor

Know Your Enemy contains an incredible wealth of information, including legal and sociological topics, that set it apart from other security books. The scope of this book is broad, and while no one book can teach people everything they need to know on such a topic, this one covers the subject better than any other source I know. Know Your Enemy will help security professionals with specific technical information, and it will help more general readers better understand a topic they need to learn about.”
–William Robinson, former security training program manager at Sun Microsystems, curriculum coordinator for Fire Protection Publications.

“This book will be an extremely useful tool in helping a network security administrator or professional assemble the technical tools needed to build, maintain, analyze, and learn from a honeynet within their organization. Each technical chapter goes into great detail on commands, log formats, configuration files, network design, etc. As a professional working with many of these technologies on a daily basis, it is exciting to see all of this information in one place. The knowledge and experience of the authors in working with and developing honeynets has grown noticeably since the first book was published. This is a very positive revision.”
Sean Brown, IT Director, Applied Geographics, Inc.

“With the drastic increase in the number of attacks, it is important to have more people within the security industry studying attacks and attackers’ motives and sharing their results with the community. This book begins by teaching users whether they should install a honeypot, and then gives details and information about honeypots and how they can deploy them.”
–Kirby Kuehl, Cisco Systems

Know Your Enemy reveals truths about the blackhat community and shows readers how to fight off attacks. The authors contribute their own experiences and offer the curious reader a rainbow of ideas.”
–Laurent Oudot, security engineer, CEA

“The Honeynet Project has been blazing a trail and providing a hard dose of reality that computer security needs. Get behind the fantasy and learn what the hackers are really doing. This is great cutting-edge stuff!”
–Marcus J. Ranum, senior scientist, TruSecure Corp.

For centuries, military organizations have relied on scouts to gather intelligence about the enemy. In the field of information security, few scouts have ever existed. Very few organizations today know who their enemies are, how they might attack, when they might attack, and, perhaps most important, why they attack.

If the blackhat community is the enemy, then the Honeynet Project is a most valuable ally. In this completely revised and greatly expanded follow-up to their groundbreaking book, Know Your Enemy, members of the Honeynet Project, the Alliance, and the community (including Lance Spitzner, Brian Carrier, Anton Chuvakin, Eric Cole, Yannis Corovesis, Max Kilger, and Rob Lee) provide an unrivaled “intelligence report” on those who use the Internet for destructive purposes. They also provide an in-depth guide to honeynets–high-interaction honeypots designed to capture extensive information on exactly how your enemies operate so you can protect your systems from them.

Inside, you’ll find extensive information on:

  • How to plan, build, and maintain first- and second-generation, virtual, and distributed honeynets.
  • How to capture and analyze data through a honeynet, including the latest on reverse engineering and forensics for Windows, UNIX, and networks.
  • Understanding the enemy, including real examples of incidents and compromised systems, types of attacks, and profiling.

Aimed at security professionals, but containing much information that is relevant for those with less technical backgrounds, this book teaches the technical skills needed to study and learn from a blackhat attack.

Price: $54.99

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Know Your Enemy: Learning about Security Threats (2nd Edition) @ CyberWar: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

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Virtualization for Security: Including Sandboxing, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Forensic Analysis, and Honeypotting

Virtualization for Security: Including Sandboxing, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Forensic Analysis, and Honeypotting @ CyberWar: Si Vis Pacem, Para BellumOne of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry for the past few years, virtualization has matured into a practical requirement for many best-practice business scenarios, becoming an invaluable tool for security professionals at companies of every size. In addition to saving time and other resources, virtualization affords unprecedented means for intrusion and malware detection, prevention, recovery, and analysis. Taking a practical approach in a growing market underserved by books, this hands-on title is the first to combine in one place the most important and sought-after uses of virtualization for enhanced security, including sandboxing, disaster recovery and high availability, forensic analysis, and honeypotting.

Already gaining buzz and traction in actual usage at an impressive rate, Gartner research indicates that virtualization will be the most significant trend in IT infrastructure and operations over the next four years. A recent report by IT research firm IDC predicts the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011. With this growth in adoption, becoming increasingly common even for small and midsize businesses, security is becoming a much more serious concern, both in terms of how to secure virtualization and how virtualization can serve critical security objectives.

Titles exist and are on the way to fill the need for securing virtualization, but security professionals do not yet have a book outlining the many security applications of virtualization that will become increasingly important in their job requirements. This book is the first to fill that need, covering tactics such as isolating a virtual environment on the desktop for application testing, creating virtualized storage solutions for immediate disaster recovery and high availability across a network, migrating physical systems to virtual systems for analysis, and creating complete virtual systems to entice hackers and expose potential threats to actual production systems.

About the Technologies

A sandbox is an isolated environment created to run and test applications that might be a security risk. Recovering a compromised system is as easy as restarting the virtual machine to revert to the point before failure. Employing virtualization on actual production systems, rather than just test environments, yields similar benefits for disaster recovery and high availability. While traditional disaster recovery methods require time-consuming reinstallation of the operating system and applications before restoring data, backing up to a virtual machine makes the recovery process much easier, faster, and efficient. The virtual machine can be restored to same physical machine or an entirely different machine if the original machine has experienced irreparable hardware failure. Decreased downtime translates into higher availability of the system and increased productivity in the enterprise.

Virtualization has been used for years in the field of forensic analysis, but new tools, techniques, and automation capabilities are making it an increasingly important tool. By means of virtualization, an investigator can create an exact working copy of a physical computer on another machine, including hidden or encrypted partitions, without altering any data, allowing complete access for analysis. The investigator can also take a live ?snapshot? to review or freeze the target computer at any point in time, before an attacker has a chance to cover his tracks or inflict further damage.

A honeypot is a system that looks and acts like a production environment but is actually a monitored trap, deployed in a network with enough interesting data to attract hackers, but created to log their activity and keep them from causing damage to the actual production environment. A honeypot exposes new threats, tools, and techniques used by hackers before they can attack the real systems, which security managers patch based on the information gathered. Before virtualization became mainstream, setting up a machine or a whole network (a honeynet) for research purposes only was prohibitive in both cost and time management. Virtualization makes this technique more viable as a realistic approach for companies large and small.

* The first book to collect a comprehensive set of all virtualization security tools and strategies in a single volume
* Covers all major virtualization platforms, including market leader VMware, Xen, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform, a new part of Windows Server 2008 releasing in June 2008
* Breadth of coverage appeals to a wide range of security professionals, including administrators, researchers, consultants, and forensic

Price: $59.95

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