Customer Reviews

FISMA Certification & Accreditation Handbook

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am no fan of the FISMA law. I've posted several stories on my blog explaining why I think FISMA is a waste of taxpayer money. Laura Taylor's FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook, however, is a good book if you are unfortunate enough to be tasked with performing FISMA work.

The core of this book is understanding the C&A process. C&A is essentially a giant preparatory paperwork exercise conducted before "game day." When the game is being played (i.e., when .gov systems are being compromised) FISMA demonstrates its irrelevance. Still, it would be nearly impossible to understand FISMA and C&A by looking at agency documentation and applicable laws. The Handbook lays out FISMA and C&A in an easy-to-understand manner, probably sharply reducing the slope of the learning curve for the FISMA and C&A newbie.

One of my favorite aspects of the Handbook is the use of templates. If you need to build a C&A program from (nearly) scratch, or if you want to apply best practices to an existing program, the Handbook's templates and suggested language will be invaluable. The Handbook also includes many tables of examples and checklists that could be dropped right into relevant documents.

I considered giving the Handbook five stars, even though I detest FISMA and C&A. Given the technical errors and oddities I found, I could only offer four stars. The Handbook claims to have been reviewed by a technical editor, but several comments made me question the level of attention paid to technical details. Ch 12 (Performing the Security Tests and Evaluation) features the comment "Many network scanners also scan for open ports" (p 200). I should hope so; otherwise, they might not know what to examine. One of the suggested port scanners is Strobe, which was popular in 1997 (no lie). I really liked this comment on p 207, which I assume is meant to reassure those tasked with C&A: "Don't get bogged down trying to figure out how a port listener differs from a port scanner." If a so-called "security consultant" doing C&A doesn't know the difference, they need to hang it up immediately. The "Suspicious Events That Are Worth Auditing" chart on p 348 really made me laugh. Item "SE 6" says "Invalid IP addresses that are not in the range of acceptable octets, for example: 295.128.16.0." Are they SERIOUS?

In brief, if you are stuck doing C&A for FISMA, take a look at the Handbook. If you are tasked with doing anything remotely technical regarding FISMA, you won't find help in this book.

I bought this book because I needed to know how to get through the C&A process from start to finish. I'd read some of the NIST publications, and although they are great publication, they really don't tell you where to start, and what to do next. The NIST pubs also don't have very many practical examples in them. Some of the things I like best about this book are the checklists, the templates, and the fact that it is written so that it is easily understandable. It is not written using geek-o-snob rhetoric that make many computer books difficult to understand.

This has to be the hands-down, best FIMSA C&A book that I have seen on the market. It not only covers the NIST standards, but others such as DCID. It provides the reasons why, the how top's, and excellent checklists to determine if you are on track, or lost in the details of C&A. Many people are lost when it comes to C&A, but this book will provide the necessary bread crumbs to bring C&A home ! I recommend this book for experts as well as novices, only because it provides the very basic's that we sometimes forget.

If you are interested in INFOSEC/Information Assurance and attempting to understand the voodoo of C&A, this book is a good resource to start your journey !

'Fisma Certification & Accreditation Handbook' isn't the type of book that you would pick up for weekend reading but it covers the material that it says it does. Dry and dull it may be, but if you work with this subject matter this is a good reference.

****

I thought it was a great introduction to this field that is full of acronyms

Regardless of what the techno-centric, "just do it and don't bother me" crowd may think, FISMA is a sound piece of work building on decades of prior law. That said, OMB policy, NIST guidance, and agency implementation policy and practice have evolved over time, and this book hasn't been updated to keep current. A much better choice now, (12/2011) is FISMA Principles and Best Practices: Beyond Compliance. Best of all is to read a stack of NIST pubs, but you either already did that already, in which case you're probably looking for a more practical discussion than NIST seems able to provide, or you looked at the NIST docs and said, "Oh my!" or "No way!" and went hunting for a more-or-less comprehensive overview. In 2006 this would have been a good choice, I bought it myself and it sits on the bookshelf behind me. Even then it had some problems, and an absurd number of typos, but it was a place to start. Now...no.

This book is poorly written and outdated. There is very little relevance to what is currently happening in the world of C&A. If you cannot understand 800-37 rev1 you should not be doing this work in the first place. You are wassting your time to try to use this book as a method to learn and impliment a C&A program.