Latest Pre-reviews

I received two new books this week. Both look excellent. The first new book is File System Forensic Analysis by Brian Carrier, author of The Sleuth Kit. Brian is pursuing his PhD at Purdue while working as a research assistant at the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). His new book looks like an outstanding companion to my favorite incident response and forensics book, Incident Response and Computer Forensics, 2nd Ed. Brian's book examines FAT, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, UFS1, and UFS2 file systems. This is important because his book can serve as the definitive reference for those file systems. Being able to cite a resource like this is critical to those who perform forensic investigations and then have to defend their actions on the witness stand.

Now that Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 has arrived, it's appropriate that the second pre-review book is a Windows title. As much as I try to avoid Windows systems, it's important to understand something about how they work. For that knowledge I'm looking forward to reading Learning Windows Server 2003 by Jonathan Hassell. Although the book bears a December 2004 publication date, I found coverage of SP1, including the Service Configuration Wizard. I take this as a positive sign that Jonathan is covering as many Windows Server 2003 bases as possible. I hope to read this book to learn the features of Windows Server 2003 I need to understand to operate the OS securely.