Pre-Review: Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit

Today I received a copy of the new Syngress book Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit by Johnny Long, Chris Hurley, SensePost, Mark Wolfgang, Mike Petruzzi, et al. This book appears unnecessarily massive; it's probably 1/2 thicker than my first book, but at 704 pages it's nearly 100 pages shorter than Tao. I think Syngress used thicker, "softer" paper, if that makes sense to anyone.

The majority of the book appears to be the standard sort of hacker stuff one finds in books like Hacking Exposed, with some exceptions. The book contains two chapters on Metasploit which look helpful. I do not know yet how well these Metasploit 2.0-based chapters apply to the new Metasploit 3.0, whose alpha stage was announced last week. Similarly, chapters on Nessus may not hold up well for Nessus 3.0, also recently released.

A major selling point of the new book is its integration of the Auditor live CD. I learned that Auditor is going to merge with "competitor" IWHAX to produce BackTrack in early 2006. Consolidation among similar open source projects to pool resources and create better results? Heresy!