20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good companion to "Security Warrior", May 3, 2004
"Network Security Assessment" (NSA) is the latest in a long line of vulnerability assessment / penetration testing books, stretching back to "Maximum Security" in 1997 and "Hacking Exposed" shortly thereafter. NSA is also the second major security title from O'Reilly this year, soon to be followed by "Network Security Hacks." NSA is a good book with some new material to offer, but don't expect to find deep security insight in this or similar assessment books.
NSA begins with the almost obligatory reference to the king of assessment books, "Hacking Exposed" (HE), saying "I leave listings of obscure techniques to behemoth 800-page 'hacking' books." I don't think some of the techniques covered in HE but not NSA are "obscure." Noticably lacking in NSA is coverage of dial-up techniques, wireless insecurities, Novell vulnerabilities, and attacking clients rather than servers. Should NSA receive a second edition, I expect to see the book expand closer to the "behemoth" it seems to deride.
The best chapter by far was ch. 11, where the author with assistance from Michael Thumann takes the reader on a tour of exploiting vulnerable code. The stack diagrams and code snippets were especially helpful and the explanations were clear enough. This sort of material is a solid introduction to some of the techniques found in "Security Warrior." I also liked ch. 14, where the author explains a sample assessment using the tools already introduced. Kudos as well for maintaining an errata page and tool archive on the publisher's Web site.
The advantage NSA has over HE is the variety of tools on hand. I learned of at least a dozen tools not mentioned elsewhere. The author seems to be thorough while listing various exploitable flaws from the last several years. While the prose is well-written, I believe the HE series does a better job communicating fundamentals of the underlying technology. In other words, HE gives better explanations of 'what' we are compromising, while "NSA" prefers to concentrate more on the compromising itself. This technology education aspect of the HE series has always been its strong point. For example, there's no need to read a 500 page book on Microsoft FrontPage to understand the problems with it when a quick look in a HE book explains the technology's basics as well as its security flaws.
It's been over a year since the 4th edition of HE was published, so I recommend buying NSA to freshen your assessment skills. For the scenarios it does cover, which include most UNIX and Windows Internet-based attacks, it is thorough and accurate. Combined with O'Reilly's "Security Warrior," NSA presents an updated picture of the assessment scene.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Systematically understanding network access, April 3, 2004
[A review of the 2nd EDITION. This review was written on 3 December 2007.]
Over 3 years has elapsed since McNab wrote his first edition. Much of that edition is still valid. Sadly, in a way, because it means that despite the best efforts of that book and others of its ilk, we remain plagued with network attackers and insecure systems.
One of the constants between the editions is the focus on IPv4. Still! IPv6 only gets a glancing mention in the second edition. While everyone recognises that IPv4 will get exhausted of addresses, the transition to v6 still gets postponed. McNab ruminates that this very transition will of its own accord generate compromises. I wish he'd expand on this remark. But maybe there is yet little market reason to do so.
Another thing that does not get mentioned is phishing. In early 2004, it was still a minor threat. It has since blossomed into a chronic problem. But McNab is correct to ignore it, up to a point. He believes, as apparently does most of the IT security field, that phishing is largely a social engineering problem. That it is not a technical problem of patching bugs, per se. Yet viewed properly, phishing is a network attack that uses social engineering, and it is amenable to technical countermeasures that involve, in part, network actions.
I especially favour this edition, for the reasons in the preceding paragraph. In 2004, I and a co-inventor, Marvin Shannon, devised a US Patent Pending against phishing. The second edition of McNab's book came out in November 2007, and by not discussing phishing, it buttresses our claims of non-obviousness, 3 years after our filing.
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[A review of the 1st Edition. This review was written on 3 April 2004.]
A logically very systematic delineation of ways that your system could be attacked over the Internet. There are standard ways to access your computer like rlogin, telnet, ssh and ftp. But each implementation of these faces the risk that an error was made in its coding, which might then be found and exploited by a cracker. Plus, since the advent of the Web, there are Web services that have not checked for the stereotypical but very real case of buffer overflow in submitted input over the network.
McNab describes all these, and more. But perhaps more usefully, his book is not a simple recital of implementation versions and associated known bugs and available patches. He tries instead to guide the reader into understanding the broad ideas in network access, and using a viewpoint of logically analysing for any weaknesses. Because any static listing of versions and bugs runs the risk of being obsoleted in a few years.
He presents web sites that are good resources for patches or latest versions of key programs. If you are concerned about a specific program, try going straight to it in the book and seeing what advice he offers.
For all the programs he mentions, some prior knowledge of their use would be handy. He gives a succinct description of each, but really he assumes you have already used it.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than Hacking Exposed, April 9, 2004
This book is a great resource for any administrator with IP networks to protect. As Wes Boudville says, it certainly is systematic with some great guidelines and useful checklists. The high level concepts laid out by the author make it much easier to understand the underlying issues with security nowadays. Instead of listing bugs and patches, McNab explains the different bug types, and I learnt a lot about stack and heap overflows in the application security chapter.
I'd recommend this book over Hacking Exposed and other books with the word 'hacking' in the title. The assessment material is comprehensive from both Unix and Windows standpoints, and I certainly picked up a bunch of new tricks that I wasn't aware of before. The book has great coverage of all the latest tools and techniques, but written in a timeless way. At just under 400 pages you'll find that it's not too long either!
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