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まぁ、セキュリティーの仕組みがわかりかけてきた人には
バイブルになっていいかもしれない。
けど・・・システムが古い会社での悪用は禁止だよ!
難しさの点では本書はもっと上だ。思わせぶりな写真の代わりに各種のログやpingの結果などが出てくる。いったい何があったのかをこれらの資料や情景描写から解析していく、というものだ。
ずっと昔のことになるが、セキュリティ管理の現場で出会うと、こうしたログには相当どきどきさせられる。日常的に出会うのはワメ?ムやしつこいスパムなどのログが大半だが、まれに、素性のわからない新入社員らしきやつのマシンから、社内サーバに忍び込もうというようなパケットやログが飛んできたりすることがある。そんなときには、また、ドキドキしながらも、「くふふふ、そうくるか、小僧♪」みたいな感じで、うれしい。
本書を読んでいたら、JAFの写真クイズのワクワクや、社内セキュリティのドキドキをちょっとだけだが感じた。前編の方も読みたくなったよ。
Impressive wireless DoS attack, social engineering penetrations (including one case with no technical penetration whatsoever), mysterious web defacements, SQL injection, DNS tunneling case and router attack inform and educate, just as the first book did. Authors' mildly perverse sense of humor keeps the reader in a good mood. The book begs to be read in one helping (and then reread, as needed)! "The Challenge 2" again covers a wide range of victims and attack methods.
An interesting case asks for writing an exploit and provides a walkthrough for a simple local buffer overflow attack, a novel feature of this edition.
At about scenario 12, things start to heat up and solving the case starts to require some thinking. Harder to crack cases and more sophisticated attackers up the fun level and value of information learned. Just as in the first book, solving the case usually takes some log analysis, some security knowledge and careful reading about character actions and observations.
In addition to technology-astute readers, the book will also satisfy the hard-core security policy fans. Some of the questions asked about the cases involve policy decisions.
As for the book minor blemishes, it suffers a bit from a "sequel syndrome". Namely, since the first book was so amazingly good, it is very hard to beat it and most people will compare it to the first one. Let's say that "The Challenge 2" is almost as good as its predecessor. A couple of scenarios sound somewhat ridiculous (e.g. one on "wireless terrorists"). Another couple is painfully obvious (few people are impressed by a /bin/sh bound to a port in inetd.conf or by a default router password nowadays). In addition, the scenario names often give out a hint that spoils the fun of "cracking" the story ("Freeloader" and some others).
Overall, the book is a must have, both for its educational and entertainment value. The Hacker Challenge books fuse fun storyline, mystery and technical information in one great package, that makes for awesome reading for all technical readers, in security field and beyond. It was clearly a great idea to invent such a "security thriller" book.
Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA is a Senior Security Analyst with a major information security company. His areas of infosec expertise include intrusion detection, UNIX security, forensics, honeypots, etc. In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org
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