Hacker's Challenge : Test Your Incident Response Skills Using 20 Scenarios

Mike Schiffman has hit upon a great formula for Hacker's Challenge. Rather than try to research, fully understand, and adequately explain attacks that have taken place on other people's networks--the approach taken by too many writers of books about computer security--Schiffman lets network administrators and security experts tell their stories first-hand. This is good. What's better is that Schiffman has edited each of their war stories into two sections: one that presents the observations the sysadmin or security consultant made at the time of the attack, and another (in a separate part of the book) that ties the clues together and explains exactly what was going on. The challenge in the title is for you to figure out what the bad guys were doing--and how best to stop them--before looking at the printed solution. Let's call this book what it is: an Encyclopedia Brown book for people with an interest in network security.

It doesn't really matter, from a value-for-money standpoint, whether your skills are up to the challenge or not. The accounts of intrusions--these are no-kidding, real-life attacks that you can probably learn from, by the way--are written like chapters from a novel (though log file listings, network diagrams, and performance graphs appear alongside the narrative text). Recall every time you've seen a movie or read a book with computer scenes so technically inaccurate they made you wish for a writer with a clue. Schiffman and Hacker's Challenge is what you wished for. --David Wall

Topics covered: The sorts of attacks that black-hat hackers (everyone from script kiddies to accomplished baddies) launch against Internet-linked computers and networks. Everything is presented from the perspective of the defenders--i.e., the network administrators--who have to look at log files and process activity to figure out what's going on.