Customer Reviews

Internet Lockdown: Internet Security Administrator's Handbook

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

 

 

The author has presented a realistic, hands on approach to security, circumvents the theory and gets right to practice which is what my IT staff really needs to prevent intrusions, assess weaknessses, training employees etc. Section on cryptography in chapter 5 is excellent and really explains a challenging concept in plain english. In addition to the hands on approach, the book is holistic in that it addresses security at the application level, system level and network level. I am an IT manager and the book is filled with effective best practices for our department to adopt. In addition to best practices, there are checklists in an appendix that we can use as quick references for incident responses, locking down our Unix servers as well as NT and Linux. I would have liked to have seen checklists for NetWare and Windows 2000 though. The author has also provided an excellent resource list in the back of the book. All of my staff members are getting a copy of this title to keep on hand, it provides the practical, hands-on knowledge we need to solve the security issues at hand on the fly and long-term without having to wade through 800 pages of theoretical discussions.

A large majority of the information presented in this book can easily be found by using popular search engines on the Internet. It seems that the author simply rehashed documentation he created in the course of his job and made a book out of it. There is no clear direction or any attempt at explaining his methods and/or techniques.

While he has an impressive area of letters following his name (CCNA, CNE, etc), none of them have anything to do with a security related certification. Where is the GSEC, GCFW, GCIA or the default standard for security professionals, CISSP??? Granted, industry certifcations usually don't mean a thing unless they can be backed up with experience but if you are going to use certifications in an attempt to sell a book, at least choose some that have something to do with information security!!