Customer Reviews

Stealing the Network: How to Own a Shadow

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

 

 

Did you enjoy the previous three Stealing the Network books? Are you looking for more? Then move along now, nothing to see here.
The prior books were interesting because they introduced the reader to new ideas or new angles on old ideas, then moved on without belaboring them. If you wanted more details, there were often URLs provided. The last two tied the stories together with the intriguing Knuth character. But the folks running the project chose to switch to a new format, with fewer characters and stories, not to mention fewer authors, and fewer ways to split the profits.
After three books with the same (proven) formula, it's understandable the authors would want to try something new. Alas, it's a disaster.

Welcome to "How to Own a Shadow," aka "The SQL Injection Adventures of Pawn." Pawn is one of the new characters in this volume, and is the first StN character I hoped would get shot to death by the cops in a mini-mall parking lot. Yes, he's that irritating. Particularly after reading 40 pages about his childhood as a high-functioning autistic (or something like that), and around 100 pages of him performing SQL injection attacks. Most of which is totally unrelated to Knuth. Note to the authors: SQL injection is interesting, but if you want to write a book about it, just write a book about it. I even gave you a title, what more do you want? You can even recycle much of this book, like you recycled part of the last one here.

Oh, you noticed the real subtitle of the book, "The Chase for Knuth." First, one chases _after_ fugitives, and hunts or searches _for_ them. Not that it matters, because there's not much chasing or hunting going on in this book. There isn't much Knuth, either. We see him in the first hundred pages, which is mostly about his son analyzing poker software. That's the last we see of either of them. Because, really, this is "The Biography of Pawn." We do get 50 pages of Knuth at the end of the book, but don't get excited: it's all from the last book, added as obvious filler.

Speaking of filler, there's a 17 page advertorial thrown in for BiDiBLAH, which is commercial software by SensePost. Oddly enough, they're listed as technical advisors for the book. I'm sure it's a fine app, but the authors have forgotten about Knuth again, since it has nothing to do with the story. If it had been relevant, it might have been a less obnoxious addition.

Not everything is bad. There's a brief bit about RFID, which of course turns into how to use RFID for SQL attacks. We get to meet Knuth's supposedly dead wife, and a charming shrew she is. All in all, though, this book isn't worth reading unless you're a truly devoted fan of the series, or SQL. I'm still a fan of the previous books, and I hope the authors can recapture what made them so intriguing for their next book. I won't be buying that one until I'm sure it's not Book Two of the Pawn Saga, however.

Let me first say that I am one of the authors on this book. I don't think authors can objectively review their own work in a forum such as this, so I won't. This won't stop me from rating it five stars to help reinforce the law of averages. ;-)

I will, however, address a few reviews posted here. First and foremost, I am a huge fan of the Stealing series, and the authors that worked on each of the three previous books. But based on customer reviews and our own feelings on the matter, the authors unanimously agreed that boosting the story value of the book was a priority. After all, even security geeks deserve a good plot and decent characters if they take the time to read technical fiction. Books of this genre should also teach. By all fair reviews, this book does both. If you're interested in straight fiction, or straight tech, you'll find this book to only be half-good. If you're willing to be entertained, and are looking to learn something cool about hackers and how they operate, this is the book for you. And there I go, drifting into a review.

So let me address one other complaint: the lack of a "real" ending. Well, that's our fault. There's more to the series, and we know how it's going to end, but we adamantly refused to slip another deadline, so the book went to print with a cliffhanger ending. Now we're not out to sell more books or make your life miserable by leaving you hanging, but this book had to either wrap up where it did, or it would have been scrapped by the publisher, who had no real choice in the matter. As authors, we missed our deadlines, but we did it in order to improve the final product. I'm personally proud of the end result, and the reviews show that we have good reason to be proud.

So to long-time Stealing readers, this book is different because we grew in our craft, and our EXTREMELY capable story editor (Scott Pinzon) held us to the standard of mainstream fiction. Will we make the New York Times best-seller list because of our efforts? No. But this book isn't for those readers. It's for those in and around technology that have read one to many straight technical books.

So we would love to hear what you think. Post a review if you'd like, or if you just want to chat about the book, head over to the "book talk" section of my web site's forums (you know where to find it- Google is your friend). I'd love to hear from you.

j0hnny

The book is written much better than the previous ones in terms of style, it actually looks like it was very well proofread and edited, but it really lacks in substance which the previous books were full of! So we are introduced to some reverse engineering techniques (rather superficially), nothing new, it was covered to a much better extent in How to Own the Box, the very first book. Lots of extra background, often unnecessary and very predictable. A long story on a little 'different' boy who grows up to get very excited by sql injections... A story that somehow manages to be a bit entertaining, if not for an abrupt ending that leaves you with a surprised and disappointing look on your face. That's it? So who exactly was stealing whose shadow?

That was not even talking about a terribly delayed release. I pre-ordered this book in May 2006 and they kept pushing the date at least 5 times. And after all this waiting I get a half baked sql injection tutorial and learn pretty much zero about Knuth and how his story would end. Are they in for another sequel? This is not Star Wars after all.

Tries to hard to be an actual book. Security researchers should stick to what they're good at which I thought they did well in the other books in the series.

While the other books in this series are all excellent and intelligently written, this book falls extremely short of being worthy of the "stealing the network " name.
the beginning of this book tracks the action of knuth's son and where he comes to be. this portion of the book is quite interesting and goes on for a decent amount of time..
however,
after this point everything takes a serious turn for the worse- the stories from this point on seemingly get more and more distant from any logical path stemming from the original books.. towards the end a story begins about a boy and how he grows up to be a hacker, while an interesting read, its overly long and has absolutely nothing to do with the main premise of the book, only at the end does he get connected in a small way with any of the books main characters, and at that its not even explained how it came to be.
after you have meandered through all this information about how he came to be a hacker and the path he took to learn everything it is tacked on at the end, as if pure afterthought a connection to the main storyline.

i cannot believe that some of the creators voluntarily published this, or perhaps the small amount of people who composed this book compared to the others alludes to the fact that it was never going to be a complete project. while a good " hacker " book in some small respect.. reading documents easily available on the net and putting a storyline to them after the fact.. is exactly the opposite of what i have come to expect from the stealing the network series.


- i read this book from a pdf i recieved from ordering directly thru syngress because amazon was severely late in showing it was published.

-english is not my first language.. please forgive ;)

this installment is not worthy of the series IMHO... for sure it has it's qualities (mature story line not being one of them), but overall it fails to capture the edge and versatility of previous books... I'm disappointed and I most likely will not buy #5

Remember "stealing the network, how to own the box" how groundbreaking and fun it was to read, an intesely technical, multifaceted thriller. Remember reading the next two books, how to own an identity and how to own a continent, glued to the pages as the authors seemlessly twisted what started off as an unorganised collection of stories in the first book into a over arching plot in the next two.

Now forget all that because the excellent story format of the first three books has been dumped. The whole book now is written by just three guys and they're not very good writers. Knuth the shadowy arch villian escapes the clutches of the NSA only set up seedy poker website and spend his time sampling the local prostitutes. We meet a new character pawn, who is a naieve ninja(literally) hacker extrodinaire, the only way he could be more awesome would be if he was a pirate as well as a ninja. How someone could be such an accomplished hacker and so freaking naieve I have no idea, you'd think the person who spends his whole day breaking into other peoples computers would be a little bit more paranoid about his interpersonal interactions instead of just trusting every person who tries to exploit him.

To top it all off, nothing happens in this book, we introduce 3 new characters and that is it. Nothing else of consequence.

I can only assume the authors got greedy and decided that they didn't want to cut anyone else in on this book so they could take all the money for themselves. They also seems to have decided that 1 book wouldn't give them enough money so they artificially elongated it and turn it into 2 books, hey maybe it's a triology who knows, this could be the next Star Wars, they can all be George Lucas.

Basically if you loved the other 3 books steer clear of this one, it stinks.

It's nice when recreational reading overlaps with technical material, and the Stealing The Network series qualifies for that designation. The latest installment is Stealing the Network: How to Own a Shadow - The Chase For Knuth by Johnny Long, Timothy Mullen, Ryan Russell, and Scott Pinzon, and it's an enjoyable read that is heavy on the technical how-to while maintaining a decent plotline.

There's basically two story-lines here... The first involves Robert Knoll Jr. and his father, and is a continuation from the last book. All the police surveillance and investigations are taking a toll on Junior's life, so he decides to act on his father's cryptic message to head down to Mexico with nothing much more than the clothes on his back (and a large amount of cash). He is contacted by people who work for his father, and is taken down to Costa Rica where Senior runs an on-line poker site. Everything that Junior wants is provided (top of the line, too), and he starts doing some programming and network intel for his father. But he really doesn't have a clue as to what Senior is really up to...

The second story-line involves an autistic kid by the name of Paul Wilson. As he grows up, he starts gaining an interest in computer hacking and solving puzzles involving gaining access to various network sites. He's befriended by an on-line entity known as Rafa who is amazed at how Paul can pick up concepts almost immediately. It helps that he has a photographic memory and is wired such that these types of problems engage him. Rafa starts paying him for "research assignments", and Paul is thinking that he's actually doing legit security work. That, coupled with his intense interest in the martial arts, pretty much absorbs all his time. But he starts to understand a bit of what's really going on when he starts to hack a mysterious local business in order to help out a woman in his dojo. She has an ulterior motive for wanting to use his phenomenal hacking skills, but it may get them both arrested or killed.

From a plot pacing standpoint, I was pleasantly surprised. The other books tended to be a bit more "vignette" in nature, so the overall story suffered. At least here, the plot and technology actually supported each other. Again, it's not New York Times best-seller action-adventure, but it works for this type of approach. Paul seemed to be a bit over-the-top in his skills, but that element was supported by his autism. It stretched credibility at times, but not so much that you started to laugh (or at least I didn't). My biggest disappointment is that there was no plot resolution to either story-line, so it's a given that you'll need to read the next one to see how it turns out. The plotlines are converging, and the next book *should* be pretty good. Still, I would have liked a bit more payoff at the end.

Regardless, this is an interesting book about hacking techniques (complete with code) all wrapped up in an action/adventure plot. I'll be interested to see how they merge the story and carry it on in the next installment...

This book was excellent for someone interested in technology but has a hard time reading dull technical books. I have been interested in digital security for a while, but until recently hadn't played around with SQL injections. I was interested in learning more about them and pleased to see that this book offered an excellent primer on SQL injections in the form of a story, which held my interest. In addition there was a cool primer on RFID hacking which I really enjoyed. The supporting story was intriguing and kept me reading to find out what happened next.

There was a cliffhanger ending, and now I'm really looking forward to the next one.

You can definately see the influence of the infamous Johny Long in the writing of this one. The book is incredible i was 150 pgs into it before I could take a bathroom break. :D get it and the rest.