Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition, Final Chapter, and DVD Review

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Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition, Final Chapter, and DVD ReviewI have just finished a marathon session of reading "Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition" and I have a very conditional review of it: It's a must-have if you don't already own the previous editions of these guilty pleasures. If you are already a fan, however, prepare to be let-down by the compilation.
The stories of the Stealing the Network series entertain in the same way that "war stories" from fellow hackers and security professionals often keeps a more intimate audience's interest: by mixing intriguing situations with juicy technical detail that can serve as a useful take-away. No one will accuse these books of containing fine literature, but that's not really the point. The stories are well written enough to keep you wanting to know what will happen next, while the technical information is as accurate as you're likely to see in fiction. Segments involving hacking are written and illustrated with enough attention to detail and length to serve as introductory educational tutorials for the topics (including web application hacking, reverse engineering, and wireless security). Most of these scenarios are believable as parts of larger-scale operations.
The first book of the series consists of independent short-stories based around characters of the authors' creation. The other three books in the compilation tell an over-arching story of a larger "operation", which involves many characters and their independent stories. The second book, "How to Own a Continent", is probably my favorite, along with the first ("How to Own a Box"), for keeping things simple, technical, and focusing on the individual stories. The third book, "How to Own an Identity" suffers from having worse editing then the rest of the series, and may lose some readers' interest. The fourth book ("How to Own a Shadow") reads a lot better, and wraps the overall story up well, however it focuses only on a relative handful of the series' characters.
As a compilation, this Collector's Edition leaves much to be desired. While the original description for this edition described the books contained within as being "author-annotated", this is not the case. The individual books are reproduced exactly as they were in their original editions, with no additional commentary from the authors, and with all the same problems as the originals. For example, screenshots in the first chapter of the first book are the same illegible black squares that were in the original edition of the book published 7 years ago. The annotations along with other features described in the original description (emails, photographs) that would provide a lot of interesting background material, would have made this compilation a must-buy.
The extra content that you are receiving is a brief new forward by Jeff Moss, and a "Final Chapter" by Ryan Russell. The new chapter is about 20 pages long, and gives the story-line a proper ending. I won't ruin anything about it, but I will say that I enjoyed it. Syngress has promised in the description of the book to make this content available separately in electronic form in six months.
The included DVD is described on the back-cover copy as being "full" of behind-the-scenes stories. In reality, you will only find 20 minutes of interviews with a few of the authors. I enjoyed these interviews, however, much like the print companion, I felt like more should have been done. Also beware that there are problems with the audio on the DVD. When played on my MacBook, there was noticeable crackling/popping in the audio of the DVD. The same noise was present, but less noticeable when played through a stand-alone DVD player through a television.
To summarize, I like the books, and find them as entertaining as I did when they were originally published, and I like the new hardcover binding. I do think that it is unfortunate that the "Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition" does not meet its potential to be more than the sum of its parts. There seems to have been intent at some point to add value to the set, but it wound up simply being a rough concatenation of the individual books.
If you haven't read these books, then I very much recommend picking up this set. It's 1,000 pages of interesting stories and technical material. If you already have the previous editions of the Stealing the Network Series, however, you might find it hard to justify paying for them again.Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition, Final Chapter, and DVD Overview

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Spies Among Us: How to Stop the Spies, Terrorists, Hackers, and Criminals You Don't Even Know You Encounter Every Day Review

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Spies Among Us: How to Stop the Spies, Terrorists, Hackers, and Criminals You Don't Even Know You Encounter Every Day ReviewSpies Among Us is in many ways similar to Winkler's previous book, Corporate Espionage. It describes threats and vulnerabilities, gives case studies of attacks and penetrations (some malicious by miscreants, some as part of his own testing), and offers countermeasures and lessons learned.
The book is divided into three parts--Part I is on "Espionage Concepts," which describes the intelligence process, forms of information, risk equations, how security's components are confidentiality, integrity, and availability, how to measure asset values, and so on. Part II is "Case Studies" and is the most interesting and original portion of the book. Part III is "Stopping the Spies," about specific vulnerabilities and countermeasures.
As in the previous book, Winkler's advice is sound and the case studies are interesting. Unfortunately, much of the book duplicates the prior book and other books in the field, which is part of why it took me three months to get through this book--I got hung up in Part III, which was mostly old hat.
What I found most disappointing about the book beyond its lack of novelty were two features: first, that there were frequent errors and omissions which seemed a display of either lack of research or carelessness; second, that Winkler takes many opportunities to tell the reader that he's involved in important things, but without showing the evidence for it.
Examples of the first include not only simple things like typos that should have been caught by the editor (p. xv "phased" for "fazed", p. xvi "over" for "cover"), but factual errors. On p. 55 he writes of the 1996 blackout of "nine states of the Pacific Northwest." There aren't nine Pacific Northwest states, and there were two Western U.S. 1996 blackouts caused by power lines sagging to trees, an Idaho/Wyoming line on July 2 affecting 14 Western states and a California line on August 10 affecting states from Oregon to Mexico and Texas.
On p. 78 he gives estimates of the number of people with various hacking skills which appear to have been pulled from a hat; I suspect his estimate of 100,000 people capable of developing hacking tools from knowledge of vulnerabilities is a substantial underestimate.
On p. 81 he claims that, contrary to other countries, the U.S. government intelligence agencies don't pass information back to U.S. companies. While this is official policy, counterexamples may be found (e.g., the book Friends in High Places discusses information flow in both directions between the CIA and the Bechtel corporation in the Middle East).
On p. 143, Winker writes that "There has supposedly been only one day zero attack, which is an attack that exploits a vulnerability that was not previously reported and known." No reference (though I suspect he's referring to a successful 2003 attack on Microsoft IIS against the U.S. Air Force prior to the March 13, 2003 release of MS03-007), and surely false, if by "reported" he means reported to the general public, e.g., via a published security advisory.
Omissions include his discussion on p. 93 of Israeli intelligence actions against U.S. corporations, where he says "an Israeli telecommunications [company, sic] acquired a U.S. domestic carrier" and "now has control and access to the phone lines of many companies," but doesn't name the company. Why not? Isn't this something of importance for U.S. companies to be aware of? (Perhaps he is referring to Verint, formerly Converse Infosys.)
Similarly, on p. 94 he writes that "There are also the recent charges of a Pentagon official who passed classfieid documents to Israel through a political lobbying group," but omits any details, even though these charges against Lawrence Franklin, who worked under Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, were well known (and Franklin has since confessed).
On p. 95 he writes of a German intelligence project, Project Rahab, that "one of [its] major reported successes includes infiltration of the SWIFT system, which is one of the world's major financial networks." Again, no references--in this case, the allegation probably comes from Timothy Haight's article "High Tech Spies" in the July 5, 1993 issue of Time magazine (p. 24), regarding the BND (German intelligence) use of a virus written by Chaos Computer Club member Bernd Fix. According to Fix (search the web for Rahab, SWIFT, and Bernd Fix and you'll find his commentary on this), there have been a lot of wild claims made, and he can't vouch for any of them. Any of these omissions could have been elaborated on and made the book much more interesting.
Winkler's self-aggrandizing can be found at a number of points throughout the book, such as on p. 84 where he writes that a small literary agency can represent people "some of whom (such as myself) have access to sensitive information." My favorite example is on p. 121 under the heading "personal aggrandizement," where Winkler writes that "An individual's desire to impress others has caused some of the biggest security problems in history." In the very next paragraph, he writes, "As I mention in the Introduction, one of my female friends was a CIA operative who posed in Playboy magazine."
Still, the book is worthwhile for a solid collection of vulnerabilities and countermeasures if you don't already have one, and the case studies are enjoyable (some of which are from Winkler's direct experience, others of which are reports of cases which have been reported on elsewhere, such as Alexey Ivanov in chapter 10 and Abraham Abdallah in chapter 11). One weakness of chapter 13 ("Taking Action", about setting up a security program and implementing countermeasures) is that it gives short shrift (p. 304) to measurement of effectiveness and the security life cycle.Spies Among Us: How to Stop the Spies, Terrorists, Hackers, and Criminals You Don't Even Know You Encounter Every Day Overview

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