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Showing posts from November, 2014

Book Review: Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime - from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door (2014) by Brian Krebs

Executive Summary In Spam Nation , Brian Krebs covers a key portion of our cyber security and cyber crime history: 2007–2013, that period when we started to learn about the Russian Business Network, bulletproof-hosting providers, fast-flux obfuscation, criminal best business practices, underground cyber crime forums, and strange-sounding botnet names like Conficker, Rustock, Storm, and Waledac. This period just happens to coincide with Krebs’s rise in popularity as one of the leading cyber security journalists in the industry. His relationship with two competitive pharmaceutical spammers—Pavel Vrublevsky and Dimitry Nechvolod—is a big bag of crazy and is the key storyline throughout the book. The competition between Vrublevsky and Nechvolod escalated into something that Krebs calls the Pharma Wars and Krebs gives us a bird’s-eye view into the details of that escalation that eventually destroyed both men and the industry they helped to create. Krebs’s weird symbiotic relationship

Book Review: The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response (2013) by Richard Bejtlich

Executive Summary Richard Bejtlich is one of the most respected security practitioners in the community. If he publishes something, we should all take notice. In The Practice of Network Security Monitoring , Bejtlich provides the theory and the hands-on tutorial on how to do network security monitoring the right way. The book is a primer on how to think about network security monitoring and incident response.  For seasoned security practitioners, working through the examples in this book will only increase your understanding of the subject.  For the beginners in the crowd,  Bejtlich  provides step-by-step instructions on how to install, configure, and use some of the best open-source tools available that will help any security program improve its network security monitoring capability. Newbies working through the examples in this book will demonstrate to themselves, once and for all, if they have what it takes to work in this field. This book is absolutely a Cybersecurity Canon Cand