O'Reilly Releases "Network Security Hacks: Tips & Tools for Protecting Your Privacy," Second Edition

Most days, modern ranchers hop into their pickups or on their horses and ride their fences. They're checking for breaks. Sturdy fencing not only prevents cattle or sheep from escaping but also protects them from predators. Indeed, ranchers' daily battles against the forces of nature have turned them into hackers. They'll grab what's handy - old nails, scraps of wire, discarded boards, rocks, even rip the shirts off their backs - to plug holes.

Of course, a durable network of gates, chutes, and corrals helps cowboys (or cowgirls) hustle the herds safely from one pasture to the next or down to the barn for branding or shearing.

Unlike modern cowboys, network security administrators don't need horses, barbed wire, and lassos to maintain security on their virtual range. Yet their jobs of maintaining security and protecting their brands against virtual predators - "black hat" hackers and crackers - are similar. They labor to maintain secure communications and information flow over a vast and untrustworthy virtual range - the Internet. And while theoretical solutions look good on paper and make for terrific school projects, tracking virtual interlopers in real world markets requires "quick and dirty" solutions - hacks.

Since the first edition of "Network Security Hacks" appeared two years ago, network security techniques and tools have evolved rapidly to meet increasingly sophisticated threats. With this new second edition, author Andrew Lockhart provides thoroughly updated, up-to-the-minute solution-based hacks for Linux, Windows, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X servers that not only enable readers to secure TCP/IP-based services, but helps them implement a good deal of clever host-based security techniques as well.

With Network Security Hacks, readers get 125 practical hacks to learn how to:

• use Snort in high performance environments with Barnyard
  
• harden Linux, BSD, and Windows hosts against attack
  
• detect, respond to, and recover from inevitable system compromises
  
• set up virtual networks (honeypots) to divert and confuse attackers.

Aimed at intermediate to advanced network administrators, the book provides a virtual pocketful of ready-to-grab solutions to everyday and unexpected networking problems. To paraphrase the late poet Robert Frost, "good fences make good neighbors, but a break requires a hack or two." With this book, security administrators get the reconnaissance tools quick fixes they need for maintaining security along every virtual fencelines.

Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.oreilly.com/catalog/netsechacks2/

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