Enemy at the Water Cooler: Real-Life Stories of Insider Threats and Enterprise Security Management Countermeasures [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Brian Contos (Author), Dave Kleiman (Reviewer)
Key Phrases: enterprise monitoring solution, incident management program, insider threats, Action Item, United States, Special Publication (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Throughout, Contos uses his extensive personal experiences to illustrate Internet security breaches and provide countermeasures. This book requires little if any technical background and is intended to appeal to a broad audience.- Choice, E. M. Aupperle

Product Description
The book covers a decade of work with some of the largest commercial and government agencies around the world in addressing cyber security related to malicious insiders (trusted employees, contractors, and partners). It explores organized crime, terrorist threats, and hackers. It addresses the steps organizations must take to address insider threats at a people, process, and technology level.

Today's headlines are littered with news of identity thieves, organized cyber criminals, corporate espionage, nation-state threats, and terrorists. They represent the next wave of security threats but still possess nowhere near the devastating potential of the most insidious threat: the insider. This is not the bored 16-year-old hacker. We are talking about insiders like you and me, trusted employees with access to information - consultants, contractors, partners, visitors, vendors, and cleaning crews. Anyone in an organization's building or networks that possesses some level of trust.

* Full coverage of this hot topic for virtually every global 5000 organization, government agency, and individual interested in security.

* Brian Contos is the Chief Security Officer for one of the most well known, profitable and respected security software companies in the U.S.-ArcSight.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Syngress; 1 edition (January 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597491292
• ISBN-13: 978-1597491297
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #862,911 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem is a nail." , January 8, 2007

By	Dr. G. Hinson "NoticeBored.com" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ignore the main title - look at the subtitle. This book is little more than a sales pitch for Enterprise Security Management systems, or more specifically the ESM sold by the author's company, with a random assortment of largely unattributed and barely analyzed anecdotes on information security incidents mostly relating to ESM. The link to "insider threats' is tenuous at best and in the most part is merely used as an excuse to hype the wonders of ESM.

If you are seriously interested in ESM, you probably wrote the gushing "review notes" on the cover or the foreword (written by Hugh Njemanze, CTO of - you guessed it - the same ESM company). I'm far from convinced that anyone else (except perhaps from the ESM company and its customers who may be happy with an extremely biased view of the value of ESM) would benefit from this book, even if it is "vendor neutral" (page xxii). If you are looking for some meaningful insight into and analysis of the "insider threat", and perhaps some practical and worthwhile countermeasures apart from ESM, look elsewhere.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Real Life Security Stories, April 13, 2007

By	Daniel McKinnon (Tewksbury, MA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

'Enemy at the Water Cooler: Real-Life Stories of Insider Threats and Enterprise Security Management Countermeasures' by Brian Contos is an interesting look at some real-life situations that have occurred where nasties have gotten into systems and wrecked the havoc that they are looking to cause. While some reviewers have argued that this book is just a sales pitch to go out and buy anti-hacker software and hardware to combat these criminals, they are probably right!!! Security is always a matter of finding the right balance but certainly erring on the side of caution certainly is the safer way to go in most cases!!

Good book for IT people and specifically security whizzes to take a look at.

**** RECOMMENDED

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Explores an important often neglected topic, November 30, 2006

By	Ben Rothke "Author of 'Computer Security: 20 ... (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Even though hacker Kevin Mitnick's notorious exploits are more than a decade old, the media, and even some security professionals, continue to be obsessed with him. In early October 2006 alone, his name came up a few dozen times in a search of the prior month of Google News. Those obsessed with hackers are missing the far greater threat: trusted insiders.

The insider threat shouldn't be a surprise: employee theft takes a bigger bite out of retailers than does shoplifting, and company personnel give away more secrets than are stolen by spies.

On average, authorized network users gain access to 10 to 20 times more resources than they need to perform their jobs, and this extra access leads to most network security breaches. With that as its starting point, Enemy at the Water Cooler looks at the problem of the trusted insider and how to reduce both the threat and the vulnerability. Author Brian Contos astutely notes that insider attacks are the hardest ones to defend against, detect, and manage.

The first part of the book sketches the risks that insiders pose to an organization. It also details mechanisms that can be used to control these risks.

One such solution is ESM (Enterprise Security Management) software. (Full disclosure: the author is the CSO for a leading ESM vendor and some of the illustrations in the book are screenshots from this vendor's product.) ESM software centrally collects and analyzes log data from various entities within a network. When correctly deployed, ESM can be used to discover internal risks, in addition to correlating security information and performing other valuable tasks.

The final chapters of the book run through real-life case studies in which Contos shows how ESM mitigated, or could have mitigated, the risk.

Although the book has a lot of information, at $49.95 for fewer than 250 pages, the book is overpriced. Even though it can come across as self-serving, the book should be commended for tackling a vital and often neglected topic.