Security for a day

Hiding from the rain this weekend, I was perusing through my local book shop new releases section, when I came accross a book called Daemon by Daniel Suarez. From the book’s cover artwork it was obviously technology based rather than supernatural, so I scooped it up and had a quick glance. The back cover aluded to bots getting up to mischief on a massive scale and bumping people off.

Techo-based stories can be hit or miss, but I haven’t picked up one in a while, so grabbed a copy. With the rain pouring outside and terrible tv re-runs, I settled in with the book.

I flew through the book and finished it the next day.

 Daniel is an independent systems consultant working heavily with databases and obviously done a huge amount of research.What struck me is how realistic the technical segments were and how the thematics echoed in a number of conversations I been involved in, had or listened in on. Reading the back pages, I noted that he’d been working with the guys that did the Hacking Exposed series, so Iguess that’s why I recognize a bunch of the attacks.

At the recent SANS conference in Sydney, over a few beers after one session, James Shewmaker was talking on similar, but more advanced exploits, he’d witnessed and was teaching on how to defend against to his class 504: Hacker Techniques, Exploits and Incident Handling. I’ve only had to deal with this sort of attack at a local level. It’s almost scary to see these sort of attacks put in to a feasible story line with global consequences.  At the same conference I was bugging Mike Poor about a course he authored on bots and worms, his passion and fascination is always  infectious, so can talks for days on the topic. Pretty much everything he talked on surfaced in the book . I wonder how much of Mike’s suggestions on dealing, subverting and defeating with bots will appear in the sequel, Freedom.

Once bit that did make me smile was the though of the use of netstumber  - surely they should have been using Kismet

If your a looking for a good solid piece of entertainment with some scary IT implications, well worth a read.