Hack Attacks Books Come Highly Recommended
922276
With more than 400 pages of source code and security defense examples, this book refers to counterpart Hack Attacks Revealed hack by hack. I'm looking forward to Hack Attacks Encyclopedia: A Complete History of Hacks, Cracks, Phreaks, and Spies Over Time, the next in this new Hack Attacks trilogy.
4020335
I find this book helpful. I liked to read hacking books because it will give me information on how to prevent hackers from hacking my personal details and my computer data. I liked the part where it discussed the overview of hacking and the different hacking terminologies,as well as those tips on how the hackers hack the wifi, and on how they unlock the passwords using the varied password hacking styles. Overall,the books information is comprehensive and consistent in my honest opinion.
719235
It has everything you NEED to learn how to hack w/ using something as simple as Google.  i never in my life would have thought you could get that much server info and vuln. info with just using Google.  Johnny knows his stuff and this is a must have if you are a novice hacker that wants to stem-away from the title; "script-kiddie", this book will help you.  Thanks to the authors for this great release.
2163377
I am new to the Security field studying a master and found this book very useful for a Term Project. It is pretty much updated and gave a very good insigth on some of the best hacking techniques.

Jose
3961898
It's fairly difficult to find good books on digital defense.  Breaking and entering seems to be more exciting than protecting victims.  Thankfully, Niels Provos and Thorsten Holz show that defense can be interesting and innovative too.  Their book Virtual Honeypots is your ticket for deploying defensive resources that will provide greater digital situational awareness.

A security technician with some degree of proficiency should be able to read Virtual Honeypots and then implement at least one of the solutions presented.  This sounds like a fairly common event, but too often technical books do not provide the detail required to transform theory into practice.  Virtual Honeypots offers installation and operational guidance for a variety of deception and analysis systems, primarily for server-oriented technologies.  I especially gained a better understanding of Honeyd and Nepenthes, the two applications about which I cared the most.

While I liked the first 2/3 of the book, I have to say I really enjoyed the last four chapters.  These covered Detecting Honeypots, Case Studies, Tracking Botnets, and Analyzing Malware with CWSandbox.  Of these the final chapter was superb.  Ch 12 has probably the clearest explanation of hooking I've read anywhere.  I am not a rootkit writer or Windows kernel programmer, but the text was so well written I had zero problems following along.

I gave Virtual Honeypots five stars because it is so unique and well-written, but I do have a few minor issues to mention.  First, I was somewhat disappointed by the honeyclients section (ch 8).  I was not as confident that I could implement a honeyclient solution after reading the great material on server-oriented honeypots.  Perhaps the second edition or a separate book will give greater attention to this area.  Second, I found a few small technical items.  On p 4, it isn't accurate to say "TCP...[gives] each packet a sequence number."  Bytes of application data are numbered, not packets.  On p 13 we are told to use a snaplen of 1500 bytes, but this will cut off the last 14 bytes of many Ethernet frames.  Try it with ping -s 1472 while sniffing with Tcpdump.  As you can see, these minor issues are easily fixed in a future printing and do not justify dropping a star.

If you are at all interested in potentially deceiving intruders, buy and read Virtual Honeypots.  You'll learn about more than VMware (QEMU, UML, etc.) as well as numerous open source tools you can download and try for free.  I look forward to reading more from these authors -- perhaps a book of true case studies?
2829198
I have just begun reading this book. This is a treasure trove of information on how hackers work and what to do about it. the examples are easy to follow and understand.
I highly recommend this book for any information security professional. While I am not a penetration tester, I believe this book and the rest of the series is vital to any pen testers toolbox.
4640766
Shields Up by Liz Cornwell is an accessible guide for the layman who wants to make her/his computer more secure. What I enjoy about Shields Up is how straightforward it is, including the brevity of the book itself. Not one word is wasted, and when Cornwell repeats certain points, such as incorporating common sense and strong passwords, the reader knows to take the advice.

I was happy to know that as a PC user, I'm doing many of the right things to make my computer more secure; however, Cornwell provides advice to take security a step further. For example, she points out if you back up, but your computer has a virus, you're backing up with the virus as well. Instead, she suggests to use imaging, a concept which is new to me, and which I plan to incorporate immediately.

I was happy that Cornwell thoroughly explained each type of threat, such as a Trojan horse, virus, rootkit, etc. I knew what many of them were, but I didn't know the exact nuances of each of them before reading this book. I now can explain the difference between malware, adware and phishing.

Another thing I appreciate is that Cornwell gives easy-to-understand advice, and explains how to download or install programs screen shot by screen shot. She also recommends anti-virus software. For instance, she highly recommends AVG, which I use because other tech people have highly recommended it to me as well. So I know Cornwell is right on track with her advice.

Overall, Shields Up is not written to scare us, or encourage us to download a million things. Instead, it stresses common sense and provides doable tips on how to remain computer secure. It does not overwhelm; instead, it instructs like a patient teacher. Thus, I highly recommend Shields Up.
3757871
Great people these two authors and very charismatic. If you happened to visit one of the IT forums or speeches you'll know what I mean.

Really a great book with a logical processing of different topics. One of the great things is that they create awareness by giving everyday examples of hacking attempts and how to take the right precautions. Things you'll recognize in your daily work. It's easy to read and while the book is a couple of years old, the practical site of it hasn't changed a lot. I hope they update this with Vista and Server 2008 in mind. So certainly worth buying!

Rob Faber [CISSP, CEH, MCSE]
The Netherlands
231968
The definition of "hack" is as follows:

To write or refine computer programs skillfully.

To use one's skill in computer programming to gain illegal or unauthorized access to a file or network.

This is a good book.....the name should be changed, however, to "Windows Server Shortcuts and Tricks"....not "hacks".

The book has many good tips, tricks and shortcuts to make life easier for the administrator.  I'm always buying books to make sure I am as knowledgeable as possible.  This book has good information for my daily job tasks and I recommend it.  But I was surprised not to find any "hacks" per se.....something using NMAP or another program used to attack NetBIOS....this is not THAT kind of book.
2826720
This book is awesome. Who ever knew bluetooth devices could be hacked into. Wow this information is so useful and interesting. Anyone using bluetooth devices should read this book to prevent hacking
1224146
"Stealing the Network" (STN) is an entertaining and informative look at the weapons and tactics employed by those who attack and defend digital systems.  STN is similar to the "Hacker's Challenge" books published by Osborne, although the stories are not separated into evidence and resolution sections.  Rather, a collection of authors use mildly fictional tales to introduce readers to tactics and techniques used by black and white hat hackers.
My favorite chapter was written by FX of Phenoelit, where a female black hat battles white hat defenders.  The playing field includes HP printers, GRE tunnels between routers, and other novel tricks.  Reading both sides of the story was fun and educational.  I also liked Joe "Kingpin" Grand's insider theft case (ch 3), featuring Palm hacks and Blackberry sniffing.  The worm disassembly chapter by Ryan Russell and Tim Mullen is worth reading as well.

This book is worth reading, but it's $... cover price is steep.  While the stories are fictional, much of it is probably based on the author's experiences either consulting or studying similar incidents.  This book can best be used by security professionals to test how they would have responded to the threats presented by the fictional adversaries profiled in STN.  There's plenty to be learned by reading STN, and I hope to see sequels.
4056824
This book is great for people who just want to understand hacking but is also good for those who have a business and potentially want to protect themselves from a hacking threat. It can sometimes get confusing with lots of technical terms, so its great that the author provided a glossary of terms in the back to keep you on the right page. There was also an appendix of resources, as well as links spread throughout the book to ensure you could find more help if you needed it.
2135530
As someone who is not a social engineer, I have always found it fascinating how some of the most sensitive corporate information can be obtained by a complete stranger. Chris takes an in-depth but easy to read approach in explaining not only different attack techniques but also the psychology and physiology involved. From Neuro-Linguistic Programming to Microexpressions to the Human Buffer Overflow, this book delves deeply into not only the results that can be obtained through social engineering attacks but also WHY they are effective and most importantly for defenders, what you can do to help mitigate the risks to your organization.
Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking is an excellent read and is very easy to digest. The writing is of excellent quality and Chris Hadnagy makes it clear that he is an authority on the subject of social engineering but doesn't suffer from "knowitallism" like other authors on this subject. This is a book that should be read by both auditors and those who have information to protect. Highly Recommended.
259864
Hacking Linux comes in six parts, each of which is worth the price of the book in whole.  Part one: security overview covers all the basics like file permissions, setuserid problems, buffer overflows/format string attacks, tools to use before you go online, and mapping tools like nmap.  Part two comes in from more of the hacker angle with social engineering and trojans, attacks from the console, and then concludes with two excellent chapters about netowrk attacks and TCP/IP vulnerabilities.
All the stuff to this point assumes the hacker is on the outside.  Part three takes over and shows you what the hacker will do once they've gotten on, such as attacking other local users including root, and cracking passwords.  It becomes obvious that you need to protect things from insiders as much as from the outsider, because the outsider will usually get in as a normal user first, and if you can prevent him or her from getting root access, the damage cannot be nearly as severe.  A lot of books don't cover this angle at all, and it's done superbly here.
Part four covers common problems in internet services. First they discuss mail servers.  Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix, and Exim each get covered in detail - it's nice to see more than just Sendmail discussed in a security book.  Of course, it'd be even nicer to see something other than Sendmail installed on a Linux machine by default.  Next they cover problems with FTP software and problems with the FTP protocol.  I'd never seen "beneath the hood" and realized how wierd FTP really was, and why it's not supported by firewalls very well, and the authors show you the inner workings of it so anyone can understand the problems.  They continue with Apache and CGI/mod_perl/PHP/etc problems, both from a coding standpoint and how to secure against outsiders and your own web developers.  Next it's on to Firewalls (iptables and TCP wrappers) and lastly (distributed) denial of service attacks.  The countermeasures for the DOS problems are excellent, and a must for anyone with a server.
 Part five covers everything a hacker can do once they've broken in.  They describe trojan programs, trojan kernel modules, and configuration changes that can be used to keep root access, or hide the hacker activity, or let them get back in should the computer be partially fixed. This was not only complete, but scary in how many different things they showed.  It works both as a blueprint for what you need to defend against, how to clean up after a hacker has gotten in, and also how you could back door a machine if you get in.  I'll leave the ethics up to you.
 Lastly we have part six, which is the appendicies. While most times I ignore appendicies, these are really an integral part of the book, and are referenced  throughout the book all over.  (This very good, because it keeps the book from having too much repeated countermeasures.) They discuss post-breakin cleanup, updating your software and kernel, and turning off daemons (both local and network ones) and a new case study.  The book is good about covering Linux from a distribution-agnostic standpoint (it doesn't assume you use RedHat, unlike everything else out there) but in these appendicies they cover the differences you may encounter.  They show you how to use dpkg/apt-get as much as RPM as much as .tgz packages, discuss both inetd and xinetd, and even svscan/supervise.  They are extreemly complete.
 Hacking Linux Exposed 2nd Edition is required reading for anyone with a Linux machine, period.
3921057
This book takes you deep into the world of hacking. Anyone who aspires to be a hacker needs to learn the basics and more advanced concepts to get their foot in the game.

That is where Aaron doesn't fail to deliver. This book covers all the things you must know including hacking SSH, security attacks, hacking FTP, and even Windows RPC.

Most wannabe hackers out there simply have no clue about these things. That is why a person who wants to be a true hacker needs to read this book first before they do anything else!
1700809
I used the first book for MANY assessments in the past and it has helped a bunch. I've probably came across just about every scenario in the first book and seeing a second book with even more updated material is awesome. The second book is just as amazing if not more amazing than the first - tons of helpful tricks and tips, code and how-to's to get your past the sticking points of penetration testing.

If you do penetration testing / security assessments or even defensive security for IT you should get this book. This will shortly be a best-seller.
3393009
Very good book for the beginning hacker or just for anyone who could benefit from the great tweaks provided inside. I had fun with the step by step tricks and wanted to continue dabbling long after reading. It excited my imagination as to what is possible in hacking that I could apply to my business strategy and I plan on using much of what I learned in this book.