Three Pre-Reviews

During the last week I received two new books, and got word of a third. I'd like to provide initial thoughts on all three. First is Host Integrity Monitoring Using Osiris and Samhain by Brian Wotring, published by Syngress. I've been looking forward to this book for some time. I do not know of any other texts which cover host integrity tools like Osiris and Samhain. I consider host integrity monitoring to be absolutely essential on critical servers. Along with network performance monitoring, adding host integrity monitoring to my production environment is a personal priority.

The second book is The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers by David Litchfield, Chris Anley, John Heasman, and Bill Grindlay, published by Wiley. Could this book have been published at any better time? It seems like we read about compromises of credit card numbers, personal information, and the like in a never-ending stream. This book describes ways to attack and defend Oracle, Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's DB2, Postgresql, Sybase, and MySQL. This sort of information is at the periphery of my sphere of interest, but the topic is novel enough to add the book to my reading list. The authors are also subject matter experts and pioneers.

I have not yet received this last book, but I want to mention it anyway. Extreme Exploits: Advanced Defenses Against Hardcore Hacks by Victor Oppleman, Oliver Friedrichs, and Brett Watson is published by McGraw-Hill/Osborne. The book's Web site is ExtremeExploits.com. I first exchanged emails with author Victor Oppleman in January 2004 regarding his Layer Four Traceroute tool. I wrote about that program in my first book. Victor's first book looks very interesting, judging by the table of contents. I see he has a chapter ("10. Sinkhole and Backscatter Tools") that might cover similar information found in my next book Extrusion Detection. Victor's next book, The Secrets to Carrier Class Network Security sounds really cool; that's a subject about which I'd like to hear a lot more.