Security for a day

Being but a humble Windows Admin, certain requirements of the course overview appear to have a heavy dependency on Linux  and programming, so I decided to brush up on those latent skills.

Okay, latent skills may be a huge over exaggeration, but, in the wacky world of IT operations having to understand new, totally  unrelated skills is just one of those things.

So to get myself to a point that I won’t burst in to tears at the sight of a bash prompt, I install BT4 on an old laptop and nipped down to the bookshop.

Since the current BackTrack 4 distro is based on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) I picked this book to use as a reference source:

Ubuntu Unleashed 2008 Edition: Covering 8.04 and 8.10 (4th Edition) (Paperback) – roughly 700 pages
The Ubuntu book is a bit of a bust; it veers in odd directs and feels like the editor didn’t pay attention to the flow and feel of the book’s subject or target audience.

The book starts for me at chapter four, as the first three chapters are just confusingly written. The book has some useful information but I will probably use it for reference as it’s hard to follow. I’m not an Ubuntu expert, so I would have done much better with Keir Thomas’ Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference. It’s a free, about 100 pages and very well written.

As an overview of the fuzzing and programming concepts of the course I went for:

Gray Hat Hacking, Second Edition: The Ethical Hacker’s Handbook (Paperback) – roughly 500 pages

Great book, but it jumps in to the deep end without showing any remorse.  If your idea of programming is BASIC, nice cups of tea and biscuits, this is a nasty surprise. This should be tremendously useful should I be able to understand anything past chapter Six. Excellent step by step explanations, but still complex stuff to master.

I could spend a week, or five, walking through the chapters and the additional reading recommended.

Managing to read through the entire book was a challenge in itself. The later chapters require you to understand the previous chapters and be able to apply that knowledge to the chapter. I will have to re-read those chapters while slowly working through the exercises for the book.

For scripting, Ash and Damian recommended the following two:

Learning Python, 3rd Edition

Learning Perl, 5th Edition (Paperback)

Buying O’Reilly is never a waste of money or time, so I picked up both of these.

I have given myself the goal of reading, cover to cover, three of these books before the course starts in fifteen day.

Fortunate for me, I have a long bus commute to and from work. Thinking of getting a cap with a propeller on it as well, just in case the scary IT book, furrowed brow and constant muttering to myself doesn’t point out I’m a geek.