Hacker's Challenge : Test Your Incident Response Skills Using 20 Scenarios

Mike Schiffman has hit upon a great formula for Hacker's Challenge. Rather than try to research, fully understand, and adequately explain attacks that have taken place on other people's networks--the approach taken by too many writers of books about computer security--Schiffman lets network administrators and security experts tell their stories first-hand. This is good. What's better is that Schiffman has edited each of their war stories into two sections: one that presents the observations the sysadmin or security consultant made at the time of the attack, and another (in a separate part of the book) that ties the clues together and explains exactly what was going on. The challenge in the title is for you to figure out what the bad guys were doing--and how best to stop them--before looking at the printed solution. Let's call this book what it is: an Encyclopedia Brown book for people with an interest in network security.

It doesn't really matter, from a value-for-money standpoint, whether your skills are up to the challenge or not. The accounts of intrusions--these are no-kidding, real-life attacks that you can probably learn from, by the way--are written like chapters from a novel (though log file listings, network diagrams, and performance graphs appear alongside the narrative text). Recall every time you've seen a movie or read a book with computer scenes so technically inaccurate they made you wish for a writer with a clue. Schiffman and Hacker's Challenge is what you wished for. --David Wall

Topics covered: The sorts of attacks that black-hat hackers (everyone from script kiddies to accomplished baddies) launch against Internet-linked computers and networks. Everything is presented from the perspective of the defenders--i.e., the network administrators--who have to look at log files and process activity to figure out what's going on.

"A solve-it-yourself mystery that will draw you in with entertaining, yet realistic scenarios that both challenge and inform you." --Tim Newsham, security research scientist, @stake, Inc.

Malicious hackers are everywhere these days, so how do you keep them out of your networks? This unique volume challenges your forensics and incident response skills with 20 real-world hacks presented by upper-echelon security experts. Important topics are covered, including Denial of Service, wireless technologies, Web attacks, and malicious code. Each challenge includes a detailed explanation of the incident--how the break-in was detected, evidence and possible clues, technical background such as log files and network maps, and a series of questions for you to solve. Then, in Part II, you get a detailed analysis of how the experts solved each incident.

Excerpt from "The Insider":

The Challenge:

Kris, a software company's senior I.T. staffer, got a call from the helpdesk....Users were complaining that the entire contents of their inbox, outbox, and deleted items folders had completely disappeared....The following Monday, Kris found that the entire Exchange database had been deleted....The attacker sent an email from a Yahoo! account taking responsibility for the attacks....The e-mail had been sent from a machine within the victim's network. Kris brought in an external security team who immediately began their investigation...In addition to gathering physical security logs, Microsoft Exchange logs, and virtual private network (VPN) logs they interviewed key people inside the company....

The Solution:

After reviewing the log files included in the challenge, propose your assessment--whendid the deletion of e-mail accounts begin and end, which users were connected to the VPN at the time, and what IP addresses were the users connecting from? Then, turn to the experts' answers to find out what really happened.

Contributing authors include:

Top security professionals from @stake, Foundstone, Guardent, The Honeynet Project, University of Washington, Fortrex Technologies, SecureMac.com, AnchorIS.com, and the National Guard Information Warfare unit.

"Sobre este título" puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro.