Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
November/December 2004 | Home

Book Review: Security Warrior

by Linda Shaltz
EBSTC President-Elect

Cyrus Peikari & Anton Chuvakin
Security Warrior
Copyright 2004, ISBN 0596005458

Topic

Security Warrior provides information about security for computer systems. It covers some security issues facing individual PCs but deals primarily with server security.

Audience

This book is not for the non-technical individual. Those among us who have come from backgrounds in engineering or computing might find it interesting, but beware! You must understand Assembly language to use this book for anything more than a doorstop. The authors warn readers in the Preface that the typical reader is “an intermediate- to advanced-level practitioner.” Personally, I think it leans a bit more toward the advanced practitioner.

Content and Usability

There are pages and pages (and pages and pages) of code in this little beauty, so if you understand Assembly and want someone to do the coding for you, I recommend this book highly. It deals with topics such as Reverse Engineering (for Windows and Linux), Performing Attacks (good for the would-be hackers who might be reading this), OS Fingerprinting, Wireless Security, and Audit Trail Analysis, just to name a few.

Sprinkled in among all the technical information are a few interesting facts for the rest of us. For example, the authors explore some of the more common “attacks” that many of us experienced in 2000 and 2001. I now have a clearer understanding of why my computer reacted badly (what the hacker had in mind while he was wasting his time writing the virus instead of doing something productive) and how the very clever computer support team cleaned it up. Go team!

Not being extremely technical myself, I found the material difficult to follow, and sometimes wondered if the authors were trying to give advice on how to perform an attack. While I know that understanding an attacker helps one defend against the attack, I think a little too much information is provided. The material is, however, presented with a good flow, separating information into appropriate platforms.

About the Authors

Cyrus Peikari is the founder of Airscanner, a developer of wireless security tools. He is the author of several books on security.

Anton Chuvakin is senior security analyst with netForensics, specializing in network security, intrusion detection, system hardening, and vulnerability analysis. He is the author of many articles on computer and network security.

Conclusion

This book was written by technical people for technical people and it fulfills that requirement quite nicely. As mentioned earlier, it is extremely dry and difficult to follow. From a technical writer’s point of view, this would be a good book to use as a style reference when writing manuals for extremely technical audiences. It is not, however, a good book to curl up in front of the fire with on a cold winter night.

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