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Editor: Ernest Lilley

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Reviewer: Ernest Lilley
Date: 12/09 Rating:
MSRP $49.99 / Amazon Price $34.49

• Paperback: 592 pages 
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0130332739; 1st edition (July 23, 2001)

Summary: Counter Hack is an excellent place to start if you want an overview of computer security, and a good book to keep around for reference besides. Early on the author says that he intends a more encyclopedic than dictionary approach, and he lives up to it, looking at different scenarios and tools in concert and in depth.

Skoudis takes time early in the book to make sure you  know enough about Networking, Unix and Windows to make the later material worthwhile. He doesn't bury you in the process and he moves on to the good stuff: Recon, Scanning, Attacking, Backdoors, Stealthing and pulls it all together at the end with some in depth attack scenarios, which make great reading all by themselves. My favorite is the "Manchurian Contractor", in which a disgruntled employee uses an external Denial of Service Attack to divert attention from her real objective...doubling her salary. The author knows that social hacking is as important as social defense too, never losing sight of the human elements of the problem.

If you're an information systems person who wants to get up to speed on security, this book is strongly recommended. If you're a Counter Hacking Guru, it might not be a bad idea to see how this book pulls it all together, or explain it to us normal humans.