Customer Reviews

Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels

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"Hacking a Terror Network" tells a convincing tale of Cyber Terrorism. This fictional story uses communication technology readily available today to spin a fascinating tale a potential scenarios for any criminal element and easy enough for the novice computer user. By combining emotional motivation and computer savvy, terrorist threats press US counterterrorism teams to keep ahead of electronic means of causing death and destruction.
The only thing missing are sidebars describing instructional exercises for the reader to try out these easily used technologies.
The reader might enjoy supplementing this book with another Syngress book, Zero-Day Exploit, to continue reading cyber terrorism scenarios.
The author talks about applications to use and you don't even have to google them on the internet. They're included on the accompanying CD. Additionally, Syngress gives you 4 free e-booklets online.

I found this book to be interesting both as a fiction and technical material. The plot develops around a very hot topic of these days - the war on terrorism. Unlike your "conventional" terrorists, the characters in this book use Internet and computer technology to secretly plan and launch an attack against the US.

The tools discussed in this book were new to me, although I've heard of something similar in the past. I found it difficult at times to adjust to this interesting combination of suspense fiction and the technical explanations of how certain tools work. However, overall information obtained is quite useful and encouraged me to further research the topic of "covert channels" and stenography. Besides a few grammar errors and typos that were missed by the editors, this is a good introduction to stenography, especially for computer enthusiasts and professionals. If you are looking for a page turner fiction novel you may want to look somewhere else.

There are some important topics in cyber-security that are very important, but may not require an entire book to cover in detail. When it comes to online communication using "covert channels" and "stegenography", Syngress does what is excels at: they cover the topic in the context of a fictionalized narrative to give it a "real world" context. While not as excellent as some of their other efforts in this genre, Syngress still does a good, but not perfect, job with Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels (364 pages , SYNGRESS, 2005, ISBN 1-928994-98-9).

The context of this book is a revenge-motivated terrorist attack, borne out of the first Gulf War, against targets on the United States. Some might question how realistic the scenario is or is not, but the book weaves a story which may ring all too true today. The threat of terrorism is real, and it could/would be too easy for people with evil purposes to use covert channels to plan and coordinate an attack.

Without giving away a surprising plot twist, it is hard to envision how the scenario lain out in this book could be realistic, but then again no one on the streets envisioned 9-11 or the recent bombings in London either. What Rogers does in this book is effectively explain the different types of covert channels that can be used, tools that are readily available to use the channels, and tools that are available to detect their use. He also demonstrates that how, without a stroke of luck, it may be virtually impossible to detect the use of these channels.

The book is not written as tautly as it could be and at times you might want to say "Just get to the point!". And there are some items in the book, such as the presence of an Internet Cafe in Iraq in 1991, that require as they say in Hollywood, the "willful suspension of disbelief". Put these things aside and you will learn some new things and technologies you may not have known about before.

The bottom line is that without luck, nobody on the Internet will know you are a dog.

The Scorecard

Par on an Average Par 4

I enjoyed this book and I think that many who would like to learn more about information security, or covert communications specifically, will benefit from this book. Steganography, encryption, and other areas of information security can be exceptionally dry subjects that many people may find hard to drudge through. Putting it into a cyber-thriller novel format helps convey it while providing some entertainment value at the same time.

That said, Russ Rogers is no Dan Brown or Stephen King. If you are expecting the storyline to be as gripping as The Da Vinci Code or Digital Fortress, you will most likely be disappointed.

Rogers also sacrifices some on the educational side in order to wrap the information into the storyline and keep it entertaining. So, if you are expecting Hacking Exposed or Hiding In Plain Sight, you will also be a tad disappointed.

But, the book serves it purpose and works well for the audience it was intended for. Movie critics will often slam movies for nit-picky technical reasons that nobody really cares about. In the end, if the movie entertains you for 90 or 120 minutes, it was probably worth the price of the ticket. This book will teach you and entertain you and is worth the price to read it.

[...]

Syngress has created what I would call a new technical niche for publishing. For lack of a better term, I'll call it the "instructional cyber-novel". Their latest volume is Hacking A Terror Network - The Silent Threat Of Covert Channels by Russ Rogers. And like the other books of this type, I really liked it...

The core storyline revolves around an Arab student whose brother was killed many years ago when a misplaced mortar round (by western forces) blew up the cafe he was in. The father vows revenge, and raises the student with one overriding mission... strike back at the US. Using hidden internet communication vehicles such as stenography, the network is formed and a terror plot is launched. But before the first phase can be carried out, the student finally comes to grips with the fact that this hatred isn't what their religion is all about, and attempts to help the government figure out what's going to happen before disaster strikes. I've made the plot line pretty vague, as I don't want to give away any twists or endings...

In this instructional book, the plot line supports the technology behind covert communications. A great deal of time is spent on the subject of stenography, which is hiding messages within pictures and . But beyond that, they also cover how to send the data across communication protocols and use headers to hide the data. What it comes down to is that there are nearly endless places to communicate covertly over the 'net, and trying to uncover them is nearly impossible. The author shows plenty of software packages that facilitate this type of communication, as well as packages that help discover files that have stenography characteristics.

They story line isn't Tom Clancy blockbuster material, but it's not meant to be. This type of novel serves to both entertain and show how technology could be used to attack a country. I personally really like the genre and look forward to each new book that Syngress puts out in this area. If you're at all interested in this area of computing, you'll probably like this book.

A tedious and boring book. Avowedly pedagogic in intent. Rogers writes a novel describing Muslim terrorists in the US, who communicate with each other via covert channels in the Internet. Specifically using steganography to concoct diabolical plots.

The pretentiousness appears immediately in the Foreword, where it is claimed that with the 2004 "Madrid attacks, we saw how terrorist organisations can be self-organising based on principles that look a lot like the scientific theories of emergence". Talk about over-reaching. Those terrorists appear to have used old fashioned cell techniques, which have been around for decades. No need to invoke any recent, trendy "emergence".

Then the Prologue has a real howler. It sets the scene in Iraq of early 1991. Where a person goes to an Internet cafe?! Say what? Pull the other leg, mate. It's got bells. There is a small issue of causality here. The first browser to be publicly released was Mosaic, in 1992-3. The Web took off after this, with the general public in developed countries directly aware of and using the Internet for the first time. The first Internet cafe in the world was in London in 1994, after this mass audience emerged for the first time. And the first Iragi Internet cafe was in 2000, by the way. Granted, the book is fiction. But here it veers into fantasy.

Going further into the plot is an unrewarding venture. Much of the narrative plods and plods over simple actions like this - "He pushed the found button... and moved the mouse on the mouse pad, waiting for the screen to show him the login prompt to the operating system". Leaden prose, lacking any spark of originality. On page after page. Why do we need to see this level of detail? Perhaps if you had never seen a computer before, it would be informative. But many of us now have enough passing acquaintance with computers to render that unnecessary. The author should have used more skill in deciding what level of detaiil to omit and what to focus on.

The book reads like a computer manual pretending to be a novel.

How to write a book and make money: Find the hot topic of the day - today's is terrorism, put in your own pet theory or idea about the topic - the author's is how terrorists can use steganography to communicate and finally write a lot of fluff to combine the two. The author has written a poor story, thrown in liberal screenshots and lengthy explanation of how they work.

The author knows enough about steganography but know little about the terrorists and their culture. Of course, today any fool can sell a book about "terrorism" and most do.

By way of full disclosure, I was the techincal editor on this book. I think Russ and I would be the first to admit it is far from perfect, but it does achieve its desired objective which is to educate readers on how terrorists might communicate using covert channels in a way that is generally accessible via a fictional narative.

I would take issue with W Boudville's claim of pretentiousness. He is missing the point on the emergence reference, as it is not intended to describe the cell's tactics (which were traditional), but rather the way they came together and engaged in action in support of a movement with no solid formal ties to the movement itself (in this instance, al Qaeda). No attempt at trendiness is intended, but I'll solidly stand by the reference.

If you are looking for a perfectly rounded novel with sophisticated character development and irrefutable plot components, you're likely to be unsatisfied with this book. If you want to learn about the technical topic at hand and be entertained at the same time, this book serves as an interesting and viable tool to do so.

I am quite familiar with steganography. This book is just a nonsense.
Maybe, the fictional story could be worth of it, but how pathetic. She plans it all in detail. Then suddenly, she turns herself in to authorities, but does not get an idea to keep in contact with co-conspirators to help stop them.

Hacking a Terror Network is a good book about an interesting topic.

but it does not work so well as a novel, and is very wordy.