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| Network Security Hacks: Tips & Tools for Protecting Your Privacy (Hacks) | 
| Author: Andrew Lockhart
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $15.45
You Save: $14.54 (48%)
Buy New/Used from $5.42
Avg. Customer Rating:  (20 reviews)
Sales Rank: 550897
Format: Illustrated
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 478
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596527632
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.8
EAN: 9780596527631
ASIN: 0596527632
Publication Date: October 30, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 May be right for Unix, but Windows Users beware February 12, 2005
19 out of 29 found this review helpful
First, let me make clear right off the bat, I'm leaving this review as someone who purchased this book expecting information on Windows Networks and was disappointed. A large part of why this book was a bad experience for me is that, when a book bills itself as covering both Unix and Windows, I assume it gives equal coverage to both.
If you are a Unix admin this book might very well be just what you need.
That said, of its 300 pages, roughly 35 of them are devoted to Windows. In those 35 pages the author pretty clearly conveys his distaste for Windows even going so far as to misrepresent certain areas of the Windows World (someone should tell the author that Windows does have a fairly powerful scripting engine). Of the Windows tips that are provided, many of them are dedicated to making Windows work with Unix in a mixed environment.
Even without the coverage, it wouldn't take much to figure out the author's bias. The book is full of quotes such as "I know we're used to a robust, powerful scripting function in Unix but Windows doesn't have this so we have to..."
I honestly could have forgiven most of the above if the hacks had been well marked so that I could tell which were Windows related and which were Unix related. That way I would have, at very least, had a visual way to skim the book and realize how lopsided the coverage was so that I could have been saved from purchasing it.
If you're interested in Windows Security advice, I'd suggest picking up Hardening Windows by Roberta Bragg. It's a much better fit.
 Excellent book on security. September 9, 2004
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
This book took me a long time to read, but for a good reason, I kept implementing
the various hacks in the book on a server I had started setting up.
The book is mostly Unix related, but there is some Windows related `hacks' as well.
I think the Windows coverage was lacking a bit though. For Unix, it talks about
Linux, the BSD's and a bit on Mac OS X and Solaris. Most of the topics are
general enough to apply to any Unix based Operating System, but some are specific
to an operating system.
One of the great things about the Hacks series of books by O'Reilly is that the
information is presented in nice small chunks that you can read in a few minutes
if you have some spare time.
The hacks are all `hyperlinked' to each other, if a hack mentions something that
relates to another hack, it is highlighted in blue and the hack that it
references is listed. I did find a few places where this wasn't done
(#84 Real-Time Monitoring, first mentions Barnyard but doesn't provide any
information on it or mention that it is one of the later hacks).
Lots of the hacks in the book could be found by doing some reading on the
internet, but finding such a variety of topics all in one place, with enough
information to get you started is really nice. Even though I consider myself to
be fairly security conscious, I still found quite a few things in this book that
I hadn't thought of, or plain didn't realize were possible or even existed. I
would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in security or anyone
responsible for maintaining a server (whether or not it is on the internet).
 Useful Tips, Limited on Windows August 1, 2004
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
Overall, I find this book to be an enjoyable read. I thumb through it time and time again, and come up with some useful hints and tips (not really necessarily hacks though). It's more oriented toward BSD Unix and Linux, but I did find some useful hints for Windows (the current topic of my studies). I really like the plug for ntsyslod (hack 56), which can take binary event logs and route them to syslogd service. Nice. Finally, logs in Windows are now open for business.
I found some material to be trivial, making problems from non-problems, or rather not practical to implement. For example, one hint advises Windows users to encrypt their temp directory (hack 28). However, there are easy workarounds to bypass EFS, and the temp directory is within a user's profile, and thus secured from other users anyhow. So encrypting it is unecessary, and not useful given users can drag a file to a floppy or non-NTFS filesystem to and bypass the encryption.
One hack recommended flush the page file as some important application data might be in there (hack 29). However, this requires delving into the registry, and to implement across all workstations is too taxing. However, there could be ways to automate this through group policy objects and scripts. There's no coverage on how to automate some of these chores, which is not always straightforward in Windows.
One a final note, I wish there was more coverage of Windows. There's could be equivelent coverage of things like time sychronization (hack 44) for Windows as well.
Overall though, I think there are enough useful tips to make this book valuable. I've already wrote my name on this one...
Not for the amateur July 29, 2004
34 out of 40 found this review helpful
It's important to understand who this book is for. It's not for the amateur looking to configure their firewall. The book starts with locking up UNIX filesystems and doesn't turn back the complexity clock as it winds through all the way to advanced topics like Honeypots and various SSH tunneling schemes. I highly recommend this book for network administrators and security professionals looking to make sure they have all of their bases covered. However, for the personal computer user looking to make sure their DSL doesn't get hacked I cannot recommend this book.
Now this is a good book! July 10, 2004
5 out of 20 found this review helpful
Lots of very very very good hints and suggestions!a valauble title.
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