Customer Reviews

Penetration Testing and Network Defense

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

 

 

Andrew Whitaker and Daniel Newman show how to protect a network by showing how to attack it. Penetration Testing and Network Defense, written for network security professionals, has strong disclosures that warn against the temptation to try some of the techniques taught in the book without written permission from those who own target systems. If you have been administering a network or consulting, you will already be familiar with much of the contents of the book. However, the book saves the reader the time of going many places to acquire all this information.

There are a few non-technical parts to the book. Chapter 4, Performing Social Engineering, should be ready by practically everyone who works with computers or lives in the information age for that matter. The authors almost had me thinking like a criminal. But this is a necessary exercise to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. Appendix A walks the reader through preparing a security policy.

Most of the book is written directly to those who already have a working knowledge of networking and the TCP/IP protocol. For over 10 chapters the authors cover many techniques for stealing data or taking down a network. The perspective of this guide flips flops from hacker to security administrator. Many new features in systems today are highlighted, such as Flood Defender for Cisco PIX firewall. All of the best tools are listed, both free and commercial, for evaluating the security of a network.

I give this guide five stars because it is easy to read and has excellent real world examples. I learned several new things and got some old questions answered. The book reinforces one of life's most important lessons I try to teach my kids. Respect other people: respect other people's things.

First of all, I want to say that the authors did a superb job writing Penetration Testing and Network Defense. Overall, I was very pleased with the book. It is definitely an asset to all areas of Information Technology and Information Security. The book appears to have been written for any experience level or even job level for that matter. There is a good balance between theory, best practices, demonstrations, and case studies.

Personally, I found that the book was easy to read. The thing that is seen with most security books is that the material is often dry and boring. I didn't find this to be true with this book. Although technical terms are used in introducing particular tools, explanations are easy to understand as metaphors/analogies are used to simplify the concepts for inexperienced users. The authors were able to clearly demonstrate tools by using real world examples which the reader can relate to.

Another thing I found helpful was the fact that all of the examples were short and to the point. The authors did not go on and on about useless information. They tell you about the tool/vulnerability, show you how it works, how the vulnerability can be exploited, and how to defend against it.

Furthermore, although there are thousands of tools available, the authors did an exceptional job in making selections for discussion in this book. Although they couldn't possibly cover each and every tool, the authors did make references to external sources throughout the book. In addition, an appendix section was organized with hundreds of tools. Each tool contains a brief description and the link to the website where the reader can experiment on their own time.

To conclude, I highly recommend this book. It is an essential resource for penetration testers, network administrators, and security professionals. I look forward to reading other books in the Security line of Cisco books.

Penetration testing is becoming a hot topic again, but the available books on the subject continue to underwhelm. Penetration Testing and Network Defense (PTAND), published in the fall of 2005, would be a four star book if it had been published two years earlier. Stephen Northcutt, unlike all other reviewers, noticed this fact as well. When you combine this problem with PTAND with several other deficiencies, the result is a book you can unfortunately skip.

I usually try to avoid reading and reviewing books that I expect not to like. However, PTAND looked promising. I have several excellent Cisco Press books, like Cisco Router Firewall Security. A major problem with PTAND is that it is largely out of date. For example, Ch 12 discusses malware, but uses B02K, SubSeven, the Melissa virus, and Brown Orifice as examples. In Ch 6, session hijacking is done with Hunt and Juggernaut, but ignores Ettercap, Cain and Abel, and Yersinia. (I found it funny that p 131 of this Cisco Press book describes Juggernaut's author as "someone with the handle of 'route'", but doesn't say that 'route' is Mike Schiffman, Cisco employee since April 2003.)

In addition to outdated or missing tools (THC's Amap and Hydra are also neglected), PTAND fails to mention problems with many of its techniques. In Ch 5, the authors never hint that servers susceptible to DNS zone transfers are not as plentiful as they were in 1998. A discussion of Visual Route doesn't explain that information reported by the tool may have nothing to do with the physical location of a system. Ch 10's description of ACK tunnels ignores that stateful firewalls have been denying such covert channels for years.

PTAND also misses some technical and conceptual details. The definitions of "threat" in Ch 1 are really describing attacks or risks. On p 98, the authors should say that closed ports reply with RST ACK, not just RST. I don't think the authors understand idle scanning (pp 102-3), and their examples of fingerprinting on p 106 are taken directly from Fyodor's 1998 paper (without credit)! On p 351 PTAND propagates the myth that SSIDs "are like shared passwords," and poorly claims that broadcasting SSIDs is a "mistake".

I liked many of the case studies in this book, but several had problems. In Ch 14, the authors should have just used Metasploit instead of using shell code from Metasploit to perpetrate their case study. Their case study in Ch 10 uses Macof to overflow a switch CAM table (pp 343-4), but on p 129 the authors previously stated they found such techniques unreliable. Ch 10 fails to mention that CDP is not a routable protocol, so it cannot be used remotely. Ch 10 also calls IDS' "intruder detection systems".

On the typo side, replace 1996 on p 25 with 1986, and remember that FTP data does not use port 21 TCP. With active FTP, source port 20 is used. With passive FTP, nothing can be said a priori about the ports that might be used.

If you are an absolute pen testing beginner, you may find this book valuable. I don't see any advantage to reading this book when texts like Hacking Exposed are available. (If you think my Foundstone history makes me biased about the HE books, check out my earlier reviews of that series.) I did like the use of case studies in each chapter, and the explanations of how to mostly use Cisco IDS to detect certain classes of attack. The defensive recommendations were also decent.

Those looking for solid pen testing recommendations might find Pete Herzog's free Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual to be valuable.

This is my first ethical hacker book, it is very exciting!!. Covers almost every aspect of penetration testing in good length. Explains many types of scans a penetration tester can and can't perform, gives specific reason why you should choose to perform those different types of scan, which ones you should use to keep from being detected.

It gives an easy to understand explanation of types of attacks, how to performed, tools needed, and how to protect/detect from such attacks. It also discusses the difficulty of detecting certain of attacks.

It also has an entire chapter regarding the legal considerations and implication of penetration testing. And the great thing about this book is that even though it is cisco book, it covers many divices and operatings system.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone considering investing in an ethical hack or penetration test. It would also be a good read for anyone on a security team in an organization that is getting ready to undergo penetration testing. It is clearly laid out and well edited.

I don't believe that you can learn to become a penetration tester from the book, most of the tools are a bit older, I think the technical development must end in 2004 and the authors skip some steps from time to time especially in the NOTE sections.

My least favorite chapter was 2, Legal and Ethical Considerations, in my view, one to three pages per regulation is not just superficial, but potentially dangerous. The social engineering chapter is better than most similar attempts. I enjoyed Chapter 7, Web Server Attacks and intend to read that one again. I was really enjoying Chapter 11 Wireless, until I hit page 361, this is an example of what I mean by skipping a step or two! It is all do this, do that, with nary a clue on how. One of the ultimate tests for a security book is how well the book can explain buffer overflows. Many times, it is fairly clear the authors themselves don't know what a buffer overflow is and they mumble something about Smashing the Stack and I close the book on the spot. I have little doubt that Whitaker and Newman know what a buffer overflow is, but I doubt any reader of the book will learn it from the book. Please do not get me wrong, this is a good book, a very good book, but that is a hard concept to really teach. I am sure this will go to second edition and I hope that can be an area of focus.

I like the list of tools in the back of the book. In my view the section on choosing a penetration testing vendor is worth the price of the book. I really wish I had read something like that years ago, I could have saved money and heartache.

This book provides step-by-step procedures needed to effectively manage and conduct a pentest. Consultants, security team managers/members, IT managers/personnel and business program and service managers/personnel should read this book before planning a pentest on IT systems within their environments.

This book is easy to reference and provides fresh insight to pentesting at the user, host, network, system and application layer. It demistifies the what, why and how of pentesting in a clear, concise and repeatable manner.

Get your laptop out, have your case of Jolt ready and put on your tin foil hat, you are in for one heck of a read. A must have. When done, keep on shelf within arm's reach.

[...]

I found the book a bit dated. The book seemed more about Network Defense than Pen testing. For someone interested in Pen testing, there are much better books available

This book turns the story around backwards from most books on security. Most books talk how to set up firewalls, how to protect passwords, etc. This book instead tells you how to attack your own system and see if you can find a way to get into your network. The authors are professional penetration testors working as consultants and trainers in this area.

The book begins with the design of a testing plan to specificy the types of testing to be done. It covers the hardware and software that is available to assist in the breaking of passwords, getting around firewalls, scanning and penetrating into wireless networks and much more. It's discussion of Trojan horses, viruses and other badware is as good as any I've seen.

The whole book is well written and leaves you with the feeling that these people know what they are doing. And if these people have put this together, it is clear that the bad guys out there also know what they are doing. Penetration testing has to be a part of any large companies security department, or a growing area of consultancy for independent companies.

Penetration Testing and Network Defense (Cisco Press Networking Technology) (Paperback)

ISBN: 1587052083, Paperback: 624 pages, Publisher: Cisco Press (October 31, 2005)

Cisco is the leading of networking technology of the 20 and 21 century, and understand that security is no one time mission but require network design, testing etc. to build a secure environment. As part of Cisco Press release on security topics, I found a nice book:

Penetration Testing and Network Defense (Cisco Press Networking Technology) (Paperback)

That's introduce an interesting method to guide how to build a secure environment and protect

Networks by using Cisco and third party tools (Most of them from the open source filed).

Authors background:

Andrew Whitaker, CCSP(tm), is the Director of Enterprise InfoSec and Networking for TechTrain, where he performs penetration tests and teaches ethical hacking and Cisco® courses. He has been working in the IT industry for more than ten years, specializing in Cisco and security technologies, and has performed penetration tests for numerous financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies.

Daniel P. Newman, CISSP, CCSP, has been in the computer industry for over 12 years specializing in application programming, database design and network security for projects all over the world. He is the managing director and chief security officer for Tribal Knowledge Security and specializes in penetration testing and advanced technical training in Cisco, Microsoft, and Ethical Hacking topics.

Readers Pre-Requirements:

Although I couldn't found pre-requirements for the book readers, I can recommended using this book to readers that answer to the following pre-requirements:

1. Have basic knowledgebase in Linux/Unix administrations.

2. Have good knowledgebase in TCP/IP Networking design and implementations

(Recommended to have at least CCNA and CCDA Certifications)

3. Have at least two years of experience in SMB-Enterprise infrastructure administrations.

Book Structure:

The book build as 16 self study chapters that's cover most of the information that's ethical hacker (or beginner penetration tester) needs.

The book begin with a nice introduction on the reasons that companies should use penetration testing and divided this reasons to major stages that's parallel to known security models (Like: C.I.A. :Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability).

The next chapters review the requirements to penetration testing and legal issues with penetration testing.

Chapter 2 - Legal and Ethics Considerations - Should cover more information from my point of view and add a warning message to people that work as penetration testers that need legal support from the law team from the test company and the target test company should be used.

Most of the companies and the management (Usually in states outside the United States) don't understand the consequence of this tests and don't know what to do with the test results.

Also, due the privacy invasion and the current laws against privacy invasion - this topic is very important to understand and to know how to handle.

Add this information to this book can help to complete the missing information in Chapter 2.

The next chapters cover most of the public known attack technique and give a real life scansions and solutions for attacks.

My conclusion is: The book is recommended to each IT staff and beginner penetration tester.

Best Regards,

Yuval Sinay

This is a great book.

I had the pleasure of being one of the technical editors on this book (my 15th for Cisco Press). This is one of the top three I've edited.

While this review isn't about me, let me just say that I teach and consult on the material covered in this book. This book is so good that I recommend it to my students and hide it from my clients.

If you're already a penetration testing expert, get copies for those you mentor. If you're still on the road to expert status, get this book for yourself and give your career a boost.