Blocking Spam and Spyware For Dummies [Paperback]

Peter H. Gregory (Author), Mike Simon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0764575910 | ISBN-13: 978-0764575914 | Publication Date: April 22, 2005 | Edition: 1

Fight back and save money with these expert tips

Find out what spam and spyware cost your company, and how to stop them

Whether yours is a one-person business or a multi-million dollar corporation, here's help giving spammers and spies the bum's rush. Two veterans of the spam wars help you analyze your situation, choose the right solutions, set up and maintain them, and even show the bean-counters why such defenses are essential.

Discover how to
* Understand how spammers get addresses
* Calculate the cost of spam and spyware
* Re-engineer your business processes
* Select spam and spyware filters
* Manage implementation and maintenance

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Fight back and save money with these expert tips

Find out what spam and spyware cost your company, and how to stop them

Whether yours is a one-person business or a multi-million dollar corporation, here's help giving spammers and spies the bum's rush. Two veterans of the spam wars help you analyze your situation, choose the right solutions, set up and maintain them, and even show the bean-counters why such defenses are essential.

Discover how to

• Understand how spammers get addresses
• Calculate the cost of spam and spyware
• Re-engineer your business processes
• Select spam and spyware filters
• Manage implementation and maintenance

About the Author

Peter Gregory, CISA, CISSP, is a career IT guy who has worn just about every hat that could be worn in the Data Processing/Information Systems/Information Technology business. Peter has IT experience in government, banking, nonprofit, legalized gambling, and telecommunications. The Usenet-E-mail-Internet bug bit him in the mid 1980s. He has spent the past eleven years in two wireless telecom companies, working in positions where he develops security policy, security architecture, and security emergency response teams, and is a security consultant in general.
His passion for computers is matched only by his dedication to helping people know how to use information systems — from personal computers to mainframes — more effectively and safely. He achieves this through his speaking appearances at security conferences, in ComputerWorld and other online publications, and through a security consulting company that he cofounded in 2002.

Michael A. Simon works as a computer security consultant in the Seattle area and the northwestern U.S. with clients in banking, e-commerce, health care, and biotechnology. Mike has been working in IT security for around 20 years and wrote his first programs on punched cards for an IBM mainframe in the early 1980s. Although he doesn’t get much chance to exercise his skills in COBOL or Fortran these days, he keeps a deck of blank IBM punch cards around just in case.
For the last 10 years, Mike has been working for the company that he cofounded with Corwin Low when the Internet was more innocent, and convincing people of security’s importance was a difficult task. Mike keeps busy assessing new threats for his clients, lecturing at Seattle University and the University of Washington, and advancing the public service goals of Northwest Security Institute, a non-profit that he helped to found.

Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (April 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764575910
• ISBN-13: 978-0764575914
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,028,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Overview and Some Things You Can Do, December 7, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blocking Spam and Spyware For Dummies (Paperback)

There are some thing that you can do to fight SPAM and Spyware. But in spite of all that people are doing the problem continuous to grow. This book describes the current state of SPAM, spyware, and phising systems as of its publication date (April 22, 2005).

Unfortunately there is only so much that you can do without restricting yourself so much that e-mail becomes almost impossible for you to use. In the final analysis the authors talk about filters you can install, they talk about blocking software. But in the end, it comes down to users acting intelligently and not ordering the replica watches, the viagra (half of which is not viagra but just sugar pills), the things that increase the size of various body parts. And so far there seems to be enough people ordering that the spammers keep going.

I wonder why the officials in charge of this, whoever they may be, can't just follow the money. Where does the credit card get processed, where is the product shipped? If you stop people from benefiting, the spam will stop. There's probably a good reason.

5.0 out of 5 stars A decent overview for the beginner, March 30, 2008

By 

Mathew A. Shember (Cupertino, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Blocking Spam and Spyware For Dummies (Paperback)

This was a curiosity read as somebody suggested I write a dummies book on spam since she thought one didn't exist.

This book is geared for people that have little or no knowledge of the setting up anti-spam/spyware. If you find yourself asking "I need to setup and anti-spam solution and I don't know where to begin" then this book could serve as an ok place to start.

This book is not for people looking for extra ideas to improve their current knowledge.

I liked the idea that spam and spyware were linked together as both worlds are finding a symbiotic relationship.

The first few chapters are good for the ignorant as they attempt to explain spam and spyware. There is also a chapter on the costs of spam and return on investment for setting up measures to stop it.

The next chapters deal with setting up a project to evaluate and install defense measures. I skimmed them as I already have solutions in place. They might be boring for some; especially if their setup is small or it's a one man IT shop.

The book seems to favor the windows world as Sendmail is only mentioned. There is no reference to spamassassin or postfix.

Another aspect I liked is the fact there are discussions about security in the realm of patching, etc. Many people don't understand that security can affect spam production.

Troubleshooting is rather lite. Which can be expected as such effort would be another book especially when considering what to do with malware infected machines.

Some of the information is getting dated as it mentions postini as it's own company and same failed standards attempts.

It has some useful Net links mentioned for getting more information. I think there could have been more but that's the authors prerogative.

There are 2 appendixes dealing with a project plan and project requirements for spam and spyware filtering people might find useful.

Some areas that are missing are Reputation filtering ala IronPort. There was no mention of spyware sites such as gain and the fact spyware companies are getting purchased by search engine companies and even software companies with antispyware products. It goes to show you how much can change in 3 years(book was published in 2005).

Overall, it's a decent baby steps book for the ill informed.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars talks well about phishing, June 20, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blocking Spam and Spyware For Dummies (Paperback)

The difference between this book and other books on spam published as recently as a year ago is the extensive discussion given here on phishing. The latter has grown enormously in 18 months. Earlier antispam books gave it little or no mention.

But Gregory points out that while "regular" spam might or might not be fraudulent, phishing always is. He thus places it not as a subset of spam, but as a different category of malware. So while the book has a decent explanation of spam, this is indistinguishable from that given in other texts. Rather, the distinguishing feature of this book is the phishing explanation.

As for what he offers for remedies, he basically says that end user education is the only answer. The book does not describe any effective, known technological solution. So the fallback policy is the user education.

In contrast, our company [Metaswarm] has 16 US Patents Pending on antiphishing. Qualitatively different from anything described in the book. Which is no detraction from the book, as it provides a good summary of the public state of the art.

We believe our Pendings will squash phishing.