Customer Reviews

InfoSec Career Hacking: Sell Your Skillz, Not Your Soul

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

 

 

I enjoyed reading this book and I kept thinking to myself, "I wished this book would have existed when I tried to break into Information Security/Information Assurance. So far I've had a pretty successful IA career and as I read each chapter of the book I realized that I basically followed almost all of the books suggestions, some by my own plans and some by accident.

This book is definitely authored by an all-star cast so I was excited to crack the seal. I liked the sections on employment opportunities and who's hiring. The brief IA overview was definitely necessary. I was also fond of the Laws of Security content. I've never thought about those laws and how true they really are.

When I get time my friend and I plan to use the Creating an Attack Lab content. It was a good collection of theory and tool descriptions.

Overall this book is a good read and even though I've been in the Information Assurance field for over 8 years now I plan to use it as a reference and to build me an attack lab ASAP.

All IA/Infosec newbies should read this....it could have saved me some stress when I was just a noob!

Mark Cavey, CISSP-ISSAP, IAM, IEM, CHS
Senior Computer Network Defense Engineer

I liked the book, I like the approach, but it falls short of what needs to be done to be a truly useful tool for job hunting. As I read it the burning question in my mind was, would What Color Is Your Parachute be a better tool? I actually pulled my two year old copy of Parachute off the shelf and it is a better tool.

Still the book deserves a flip through if you have a chance to pull it off your neighbor's shelf or check it out from a library. My favorite chapters were 3 and 4, if there is any chance you might be looking for a job, don't miss those.

Even though the content in this book sways from one end of the information security spectrum to the other reaching the point of identity crisis, I really like its approach. I speak on this topic quite often and I'm finding it's the one area of information security that has remained mostly untouched - yet desperately needed - in this hot field. There are several success-related topics missing, but overall this book is a good read for those looking to take their information security careers to the next level.

Plenty of people are curious as to how to become an information security professional. It's a profession that has a bit of an establishment atmosphere to it where entry to various levels is granted in secret. And it's often hard to understand where to start. Infosec Career Hacking attempts to demystify this process and show you not only generic strategies for employment, but ones specific to the information security field.

The book focuses on career development, not on how to be a hacker or a professional hacker. It's full of some useful information about building a successful career, much of which applies to any technical field. It also focuses mostly on being in the infosec service business, not in product development or, to a large degree, operations. Keep that in mind when you think about buying it. While most of what you'll learn is generic technical career advice, some of it is focused.

The first part of the book is especially useful, and I think provides most of the value that's not available elsewhere. Things that are covered may seem like basics that people should have just picked up, but it's hard to know what you're supposed to know when you change environments, let alone see it all together in one place. I find this section to be especially useful and reasonably well written.

Chapter 1 opens up with a basic orientation of the infosec landscape, including the types of companies and organizations you may want to look at working with, the types of work and positions you see typically, and what kinds of skills you'll need to consider get the interview, let alone the job. Chapter 2 is much like a hacking book in that you're encouraged to perform some scout work on your potential places of employment. Good advice, and it's nice to see it demonstrated. Chapter 3 talks about getting experience and getting your feet wet in the infosec world. Things like conferences, local groups and meetings, and even security clearances are covered. A nice overview, but a it shallow in places, too. Chapter 4 focuses on the resume and the interview, the kinds of things that normally jump to mind when you think about career hacking. A decent overview, and good things to learn.

Part 2 focuses on technical parts. These chapters, I felt, were a bit thin on value and attempted to provide too much coverage but without the depth. What I felt this part of the book was trying to do was to be a quick overview of what you should know if you want a career in information security without any of the work it takes. Because this is such a broad amount of material, and the book only spends about 180 pages on it, the coverage isn't deep. Instead, the cursory coverage is a detriment to the book's value.

Chapter 5 is where I found the most material to complain about. This chapter is titled, 'The Laws of Security', and can be used for your benefit or your downfall. In the right hands, where the nuances that come from actually encountering these challenges in the wild and discovering the reasoning behind them, you can display wisdom. In the wrong hands, where you can't successfully defend a challenge to these axioms, at best you'll appear to be someone who parrots security luminaries, and at worst you'll look like an uninformed buffoon. If you decide to accept conclusions without understanding the reasoning behind them, you're asking for it.

Chapter 6 talks about building a home lab of machines for attack. I felt this chapter devoted too much time to drooling over gear and not enough time discussing more equipment and more valuable gear. Large classes of lab resources, including enterprise applications, networking gear, and even commercial security software was left out. The disclosure debate was reasonably well handled in chapter 7, discussing the various ways that people have established this process. What's missing here is how to actually find where to send the report to and how to ensure it's been acted upon. And finally, a nice, succinct and reasonably comprehensive (if a little too short at times) classification of vulnerabilities and attacks fills chapter 8.

Part 3, 'On the Job', is for when you finally have the position and now you want to keep your job, advance your career, and improve your skills. Unfortunately, this section feels a bit undeveloped in too many places. There's a lot to cover, but the chapters here lack any significant depth to them, and it doesn't feel like they really deliver as strongly as they could.

This section opens with an approach to your career much like an intruder would take to advancing their compromise. Chapter 9 covers how to perform scouting of your new environment, how to get through meetings without messing up, landing your own projects and succeeding with basic project management. Thinking about striking out on your own? That's natural, and the next few chapters will help with that. Chapter 10 is a short list of ideas on how you can use your new knowledge and skills to benefit others, which can help you build a name for yourself and maybe even clients. Chapter 11 looks like it's trying to encourage you to become a local leader of information security knowledge, using that information specifically for incident response. In a crisis, everyone loves a hero, so why can't that be you? And finally, the book closes with a chapter on how to start looking at being an independent consultant. It's been said that you'll never succeed working for someone else, so why not work for yourself? This chapter introduces you to some of the possibilities here, along with some of the considerations. Overall, these chapters have some clear value to them, but because they try and cover so much, they feel underdeveloped and fail to really deliver a strong benefit to the reader.

One of my big concerns when I began reading this book was that it would encourage you to simply become another script kiddy type consultant, capable of downloading a few tools and use old hat techniques to deliver sub-par results. That's a crowded marketplace already, so I didn't want to see anyone encourage that. Instead, it tries to impart valuable career skills. My big complaint is that it tries to do so much that it can't possibly succeed in all of them. It does a decent job, but in some places it definitely lacks the solid landing to make it stick. Overall, though, this uncommon book is a nice twist on the old career guides, tuned for the information security market.

Do you desire a job in Information Security? If so, "InfoSec Career Hacking, Sell Your Skillz, Not your Soul" is the information you have been seeking. It covers pertinent security laws, preparation you must complete prior to submitting an application, how to evaluate information security position listings, résumés, pros and cons of certifications, ethics, corporate culture, and presenting your skills in the best light throughout the interview process. The text was meant for individuals knowledgeable in information security or seeking to become knowledgeable. If you need a yardstick to measure your abilities against in security, encryption, client-server, IDS, firewalls, root kits, and building your own working lab to practice attack and defense, this book was meant for you.

David Burris, Ph.D., CCP

InfoSec Career Hacking (ICH) is a confused, directionless book. It's a collection of contributions by various authors, three of which were previously published. The main text never states the goal of the text, so I turned to the description on the back cover: "A technical guide to landing (and keeping) a job in the information security field... If you want to refine those skills to land a top InfoSec job and employer-funded trip to Vegas next year, you've come to the right place." It sounds like ICH wants to be a sort of employment guide for "hackers," but it ends up as a muddle of some useful original material and recycled chapters from older Syngress titles.

On the plus side, there is some good advice in ICH. The first four chapters (Part I) do contain some helpful suggestions for people who have no clue regarding the information security profession. Unfortunately, much of this material is found within poorly presented sections, and next to filler-oriented lists and questionable screen shots. For example, do we need a full listing of the DoD Rainbow Series (pp 7-9), 2004 FISMA grades (p 30), Google search results (p 35, 36, 65), SecurityFocus mailing lists (p 61), USA, Monster, and other job search results (pp 69, 70, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102), and so on? I thought the sample resume on pp 95-6 was poor -- and this is supposed to help people be hired!

With Part II, ICH gets worse. Ch 5 begins with "The Laws of Security," which seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the book. The reason is simple: this is a recycled chapter which appeared in two other Syngress books -- 2002's Hack Proofing Your Network, 2nd Ed (HPYN2E), and 2003's Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box. I though Ch 6, describing home lab components, was one of the better (if not best) chapters in ICH. The author stayed on target and delivered useful guidance on selecting equipment for a home lab. Ch 7 is a disaster like Ch 5. "Vulnerability Disclosure" is a reprint of a chapter from 2004's Cyber Adversary Characterization. And Ch 8? Another reprint, this time from Ch 3 of HPYN2E.

Part III resumes new material, but these chapters aren't worth reading. I got the impression that the authors thought they needed to be "technical," so they threw in short discussions of network architecture, incident response, intrusion detection, and other topics. I didn't waste time on these chapters, and neither should you.

Syngress publishes many great security books, and I've reviewed several recently; see Phishing Exposed or Software Piracy Exposed. If Syngress wants ICH to return in a second edition, they should bring in an editor who cuts out the three recycled chapters, the worthless screen shots, and other fluff, and directs the authors to deliver useful material.

Although the background feel of this book is to help those who are/were hackers (possibly in the illegal sense of the term) be able to apply their skills legitimately, those with any kind of information technology background can greatly benefit. From the start, the authors delve right into getting the reader thinking about getting a job in the recently exploding information security field. They apply proper mindset as to what the reader should consider, how they should approach tactical job searches, prepare resumes and gather intelligence on obtaining their first infosec job (NOTE: NOT their DREAM infosec job; its geared at getting you your first job and they are very clear about this.).
Overall, the information was presented in a highly positive and informative mannerand the book is a quick read with plenty of helpful advice. Highly recommended.

Overall an easy book to read and actually quite enjoyable. However, the material lack focus. At times you think some of the authors must have missed a memo or two, and writing for a different book. This could be the fault of the publisher or editor. Take some of the pictures in Chapter 6 for example, I could barely tell that they were computers, let alone their brand or models. These blurry pictures are next to worthless in the book. The publisher could do better in the QA department.

Speaking of Chapter 6 - "Creating an Attach Lab". I had such high hope for this chapter. Unfortunately, all I got was a history lesson of hardware platforms, and all the different Sun SPARC chips and versions of operating systems. Its nice to have all these hardware to play with, some dating back 10-20 years ago - but it is unrealistic and I am not sure of the real value of it.

Ch.7 - Vulnerability Disclosure is probably the worst ch. of the book. It misses the target audience completely. The discussion of the different types of "model" is compeletly out of place. You can find better resources on the Net.

Links at the end of chapters are quite valuable though, hence the 2 stars.

If you are looking to get into security as a career, read InfoSec Career Hacking. Good book!!